How to format time since xxx e.g. “4 minutes ago” similar to Stack Exchange sites

Question

The question is how to format a JavaScript Date as a string stating the time elapsed similar to the way you see times displayed on Stack Overflow.

e.g.<

Answer 1

Simple and readable version:

const NOW = new Date()
const times = [["second", 1], ["minute", 60], ["hour", 3600], ["day", 86400], ["week", 604800], ["month", 2592000], ["year", 31536000]]

function timeAgo(date) {
    var diff = Math.round((NOW - date) / 1000)
    for (var t = 0; t < times.length; t++) {
        if (diff < times[t][1]) {
            if (t == 0) {
                return "Just now"
            } else {
                diff = Math.round(diff / times[t - 1][1])
                return diff + " " + times[t - 1][0] + (diff == 1?" ago":"s ago")
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Answering 10 years old question to help the newcomers.

We can use this package for that javascript-time-ago

 
// Load locale-specific relative date/time formatting rules.
import en from 'javascript-time-ago/locale/en'
 
// Add locale-specific relative date/time formatting rules.
TimeAgo.addLocale(en)
 
// Create relative date/time formatter.
const timeAgo = new TimeAgo('en-US')
 
timeAgo.format(new Date())
// "just now"
 
timeAgo.format(Date.now() - 60 * 1000)
// "a minute ago"
 
timeAgo.format(Date.now() - 2 * 60 * 60 * 1000)
// "2 hours ago"
 
timeAgo.format(Date.now() - 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000)
// "a day ago"

Answer 3

function timeSince(date) {

  var seconds = Math.floor((new Date() - date) / 1000);

  var interval = seconds / 31536000;

  if (interval > 1) {
    return Math.floor(interval) + " years";
  }
  interval = seconds / 2592000;
  if (interval > 1) {
    return Math.floor(interval) + " months";
  }
  interval = seconds / 86400;
  if (interval > 1) {
    return Math.floor(interval) + " days";
  }
  interval = seconds / 3600;
  if (interval > 1) {
    return Math.floor(interval) + " hours";
  }
  interval = seconds / 60;
  if (interval > 1) {
    return Math.floor(interval) + " minutes";
  }
  return Math.floor(seconds) + " seconds";
}
var aDay = 24*60*60*1000;
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now()-aDay)));
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now()-aDay*2)));

Answer 4

Might be an overkill in this case, but if the opportunity shows moment.js is just awesome!

Moment.js is a javascript datetime library, to use it for such scenario, you'd do:

moment(yourdate).fromNow()

http://momentjs.com/docs/#/displaying/fromnow/

2018 addendum: Luxon is a new modern library and might be worth a look!

Answer 5

You might want to look at humanized_time_span: https://github.com/layam/js_humanized_time_span

It's framework agnostic and fully customizable.

Just download / include the script and then you can do this:

humanized_time_span("2011-05-11 12:00:00")  
   => '3 hours ago'

humanized_time_span("2011-05-11 12:00:00", "2011-05-11 16:00:00)  
   => '4 hours ago'

or even this:

var custom_date_formats = {
  past: [
    { ceiling: 60, text: "less than a minute ago" },
    { ceiling: 86400, text: "$hours hours, $minutes minutes and $seconds seconds ago" },
    { ceiling: null, text: "$years years ago" }
  ],
  future: [
    { ceiling: 60, text: "in less than a minute" },
    { ceiling: 86400, text: "in $hours hours, $minutes minutes and $seconds seconds time" },
    { ceiling: null, text: "in $years years" }
  ]
}

humanized_time_span("2010/09/10 10:00:00", "2010/09/10 10:00:05", custom_date_formats) 
  => "less than a minute ago"

Read the docs for more info.

Answer 6

Changed the function above to

function timeSince(date) {

    var seconds = Math.floor(((new Date().getTime()/1000) - date)),
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 31536000);

    if (interval > 1) return interval + "y";

    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 2592000);
    if (interval > 1) return interval + "m";

    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 86400);
    if (interval >= 1) return interval + "d";

    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 3600);
    if (interval >= 1) return interval + "h";

    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 60);
    if (interval > 1) return interval + "m ";

    return Math.floor(seconds) + "s";
}

Otherwise it would show things like "75 minutes" (between 1 and 2 hours). It also now assumes input date is a Unix timestamp.