User-friendly time format in Python?

Question

Python: I need to show file modification times in the \"1 day ago\", \"two hours ago\", format.

Is there something ready to do that? It should be in English.

Answer 1

There is humanize package:

>>> from datetime import datetime, timedelta
>>> import humanize # $ pip install humanize
>>> humanize.naturaltime(datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1))
'a day ago'
>>> humanize.naturaltime(datetime.now() - timedelta(hours=2))
'2 hours ago'

It supports localization l10n, internationalization i18n:

>>> _ = humanize.i18n.activate('ru_RU')
>>> print humanize.naturaltime(datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1))
день назад
>>> print humanize.naturaltime(datetime.now() - timedelta(hours=2))
2 часа назад

Answer 2

Using datetime objects with tzinfo:

def time_elapsed(etime):
    # need to add tzinfo to datetime.utcnow
    now = datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=etime.tzinfo)
    opened_for = (now - etime).total_seconds()
    names = ["seconds","minutes","hours","days","weeks","months"]
    modulos = [ 1,60,3600,3600*24,3600*24*7,3660*24*30]
    values = []
    for m in modulos[::-1]:
        values.append(int(opened_for / m))
        opened_for -= values[-1]*m
    pretty = [] 
    for i,nm in enumerate(names[::-1]):
        if values[i]!=0:
            pretty.append("%i %s" % (values[i],nm))
    return " ".join(pretty)

Answer 3

The ago package provides this. Call human on a datetime object to get a human readable description of the difference.

from ago import human
from datetime import datetime
from datetime import timedelta

ts = datetime.now() - timedelta(days=1, hours=5)

print(human(ts))
# 1 day, 5 hours ago

print(human(ts, precision=1))
# 1 day ago

Answer 4

You can also do that with arrow package

From github page:

>>> import arrow
>>> utc = arrow.utcnow()
>>> utc = utc.shift(hours=-1)
>>> utc.humanize()
'an hour ago'

Answer 5

You can download and install from below link. It should be more helpful for you. It has been providing user friendly message from second to year.

It's well tested.

https://github.com/nareshchaudhary37/timestamp_content

Below steps to install into your virtual env.

git clone https://github.com/nareshchaudhary37/timestamp_content
cd timestamp-content
python setup.py

Answer 6

Here is an updated answer based on Jed Smith's implementation that properly hands both offset-naive and offset-aware datetimes. You can also give a default timezones. Python 3.5+.

import datetime

def pretty_date(time=None, default_timezone=datetime.timezone.utc):
    """
    Get a datetime object or a int() Epoch timestamp and return a
    pretty string like 'an hour ago', 'Yesterday', '3 months ago',
    'just now', etc
    """

    # Assumes all timezone naive dates are UTC
    if time.tzinfo is None or time.tzinfo.utcoffset(time) is None:
        if default_timezone:
            time = time.replace(tzinfo=default_timezone)

    now = datetime.datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=datetime.timezone.utc)

    if type(time) is int:
        diff = now - datetime.fromtimestamp(time)
    elif isinstance(time, datetime.datetime):
        diff = now - time
    elif not time:
        diff = now - now
    second_diff = diff.seconds
    day_diff = diff.days

    if day_diff < 0:
        return ''

    if day_diff == 0:
        if second_diff < 10:
            return "just now"
        if second_diff < 60:
            return str(second_diff) + " seconds ago"
        if second_diff < 120:
            return "a minute ago"
        if second_diff < 3600:
            return str(second_diff / 60) + " minutes ago"
        if second_diff < 7200:
            return "an hour ago"
        if second_diff < 86400:
            return str(second_diff / 3600) + " hours ago"
    if day_diff == 1:
        return "Yesterday"
    if day_diff < 7:
        return str(day_diff) + " days ago"
    if day_diff < 31:
        return str(day_diff / 7) + " weeks ago"
    if day_diff < 365:
        return str(day_diff / 30) + " months ago"
    return str(day_diff / 365) + " years ago"