iOS - Friendly NSDate format

Question

I need to display the date of posts in my app to the user, right now I do it in this format: \"Fri, 25 May\". How would I format an NSDate to read something like \"2 hours ago\"

Answer 1

Here is a pretty good answer this will take in seconds since the epoch(Jan 1, 1970) and return you a nice formatted string like '3 minutes ago'. Simply call it with your date object like so:

[timeAgoFromUnixTime:[myDateObject timeIntervalSince1970]];

+ (NSString *)timeAgoFromUnixTime:(double)seconds
{
    double difference = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSince1970] - seconds;
    NSMutableArray *periods = [NSMutableArray arrayWithObjects:@"second", @"minute", @"hour", @"day", @"week", @"month", @"year", @"decade", nil];
    NSArray *lengths = [NSArray arrayWithObjects:@60, @60, @24, @7, @4.35, @12, @10, nil];
    int j = 0;
    for(j=0; difference >= [[lengths objectAtIndex:j] doubleValue]; j++)
    {
        difference /= [[lengths objectAtIndex:j] doubleValue];
    }
    difference = roundl(difference);
    if(difference != 1)
    {
        [periods insertObject:[[periods objectAtIndex:j] stringByAppendingString:@"s"] atIndex:j];
    }
    return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%li %@%@", (long)difference, [periods objectAtIndex:j], @" ago"];
}