Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leatherman

PHP Pretty Date

February 10, 2008

This class is pretty much a direct port of John Resig’s JavaScript Pretty Date to PHP 5. A few notes:

  • Requires PHP >= 5.10, due to the usage of PHP’s new DateTimeclass.
  • The new DateTime object parses strings using PHP’s strtotime, so you don’t need to pass in an ISO8601 formatted date, as in JavaScript Pretty Date. Try “now”, or “next Wednesday”, or “ 2 weeks 4 days 23 hours 9 seconds”.
  • Extended to handle Months and Years in the past (JavaScript version only goes to weeks)

Usage:

// pass in a String DateTime, compared to another String DateTime (defaults to now)
$myString = Date_Difference::getStringResolved('-7 weeks');
$myString = Date_Difference::getStringResolved('-7 weeks', '+1 week');

// pass in a DateTime object, compared to another DateTime object (defaults to now)
// useful with the Propel ORM, which uses DateTime objects internally.
$myString = Date_Difference::getString(new DateTime('-7 weeks'));
$myString = Date_Difference::getString(new DateTime('-7 weeks'), new DateTime('+1 week'));

Download PHP Pretty Date (PHP 5.10 , 1.86KB)

http://www.zachleat.com/Projects/phpPrettyDate/Date_Difference.phps


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Zach Leatherman IndieWeb Avatar for https://zachleat.com/is a builder for the web at IndieWeb Avatar for https://fontawesome.com/Font Awesome and the creator/maintainer of IndieWeb Avatar for https://www.11ty.devEleventy (11ty), an award-winning open source site generator. At one point he became entirely too fixated on web fonts. He has given 83 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Formerly part of CloudCannon, Netlify, Filament Group, NEJS CONF, and NebraskaJS. Learn more about Zach »

6 Comments
  1. Ranie Disqus

    24 Apr 2009
    Thanks for this man! Was going to use the js version but I like the php better!
  2. Devan Disqus

    28 May 2009
    This is great, i ran into a few issues with accurate yesterday handling, but i fixed them. you can see the fix here http://noise.weareplic.com/...Loverly script.
  3. Jelle Disqus

    18 Feb 2010
    Support for future!= 5.1 by Zach Leatherman (zachleat.com) // Slight modification denoted below to handle months and years. class prettydate { public static function getStringResolved($date, $compareTo = NULL) { if(!is_null($compareTo)) { $compareTo = new DateTime($compareTo); } return self::getString(new DateTime($date), $compareTo); } public static function getString(DateTime $date, DateTime $compareTo = NULL) { if(is_null($compareTo)) { $compareTo = new DateTime('now'); } $diff = $compareTo->format('U') - $date->format('U'); $dayDiff = floor($diff / 86400); if(is_nan($dayDiff)) return ''; $end = 'ago';if($dayDiff < 0) {# date is in the future$end = &#039left&#039;$dayDiff *= -1;} if($dayDiff == 0) { if($diff < 60) { return &#039Just now&#039; } elseif($diff < 120) { return &#0391 minute &#039.$end; } elseif($diff < 3600) { return floor($diff/60) . &#039 minutes &#039.$end; } elseif($diff < 7200) { return &#0391 hour &#039.$end; } elseif($diff < 86400) { return floor($diff/3600) . &#039 hours &#039.$end; } } elseif($dayDiff == 1) { return &#039Yesterday&#039; } elseif($dayDiff < 7) { return $dayDiff . &#039 days &#039.$end; } elseif($dayDiff == 7) { return &#0391 week &#039.$end; } elseif($dayDiff < (7*6)) { // Modifications Start Here // 6 weeks at most return ceil($dayDiff/7) . &#039 weeks &#039.$end; } elseif($dayDiff < 365) { return ceil($dayDiff/(365/12)) . &#039 months &#039.$end; } else { $years = round($dayDiff/365); return $years . &#039 year&#039 . ($years != 1 ? &#039s&#039 : &#039&#039) . &#039 &#039.$end; } } }
  4. Benjamin C. Disqus

    02 May 2011
    Thanks for the script!
  5. Woody Disqus

    12 Jul 2011
    Using in a new wordpress plugin, props dude, seems to fail for sub hours though...
  6. Zach Leatherman Disqus

    12 Jul 2011
    Looking back on this script, I don't know that I'd recommend using it.It makes more sense to output UTC and then pretty it up using JavaScript instead. Then you can cache your HTML. See this implementation. Also on GitHub.
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