How to create Human Friendly time format in PHP

I am going to be explaining how you can format dates in php in a human friendly format.

This kind of formatting is mostly used by blogs and social networks to make time and dates more readable for their users.

STEP 1: Get Current time

We need to call the php function that gives the current time (time()) and then assign it to a variable ($currentTime)

$currentTime = time();

The time() will return a UNIX timestamp that will look like this (1515608889). A UNIX timestamp is just the the total number of seconds between January 1st, 1970 and the present time. It is a way to keep track of time in php.

STEP 2: Deduct time difference

We need to deduct the time of activity we are tracking from the present time. Assuming a post was made 2 days ago, the recorded time of posting will be assigned to a variable $postTime and then deducted from the current time which we got in step 1

$timestamp is the recorded date of posting which is usually gotten from a database

$timestamp should also be in seconds, it can easily gotten by recording the UNIX timestamp at the moment of post into the database

$diff = $currentTime - $timestamp;

STEP 3:Create an array of time-like words that will be used.

This depends on the language you want. in this case, english is being used. Then we assign the array to a variable called $timePhrase

$timePhrase = array('second','minute','hour','day','week','month','year','decade');

STEP 4: Create another array for time limits.

This will include timelimits for a minute, a day, a week, a month up to a year in seconds. This will be used to know when to switch the formatting language when outputting the time. For instance, to distinguish when to output a day ago or a month ago. then, we assign it to variable called $timeLimit

$timeLimit = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600);

STEP 5: Create a for() loop to manipulate the $timeLimit and the $difference in order to get the final formatted time

for($i =sizeof($timeLimit)-1; ($i >=0)&&(($no =  $diff/$length[$i])<=1); $i--); 
if($i < 0) $i=0; $_time = $currentTime  -($diff%$timeLimit[$i]);
$no = floor($no);
 if($no <> 1) 
$timePhrase[$i] .='s';
 $value=sprintf("%d %s ",$no,$timePhrase[$i]);

What the for() loop does is that it creates a condition that checks if the time difference is not negative, if it's nagative, it turns the time difference 0.

Then, it creates the formatted time by converting decimals that was gotten during the division to whole numbers using floor(), then we pluralise the $timePhrase contents in case each of the phrases needs to be more than one e.g. 2 minutes instead of 1 minute. After this, we do the final formatting using sprintf() so as to treat the number of time as an integer and the $timePhrase as a string. After that ,we echo the $value which is the formatted time.

All of the this codes can be rewritten into a function as stated below . The function receives a recorded time of activity , preferably a UNIX time stamp that can be gotten by using the php function time()

Function humantime($timestamp){
$currentTime = time();
        $diff = $currentTime - $timestamp;
        $timePhrase = array('second','minute','hour','day','week','month','year','decade');
        $timeLimit = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600);
        for($i =sizeof($timeLimit)-1; ($i >=0)&&(($no =  $diff/$timeLimit[$i])<=1); $i--); if($i < 0) $i=0; $_time = $currentTime  -($diff%$timeLimit[$i]);
        $no = floor($no); if($no <> 1) $timePhrase[$i] .='s'; $value=sprintf("%d %s ",$no,$timePhrase[$i]);
        return $value.' ago ';
}

So the above function can simply be used to return a human friendly time of when a page was last reloaded as shown below

session_start();
if (!empty($_SESSION['lastLoad'])){
    $timestamp = $_SESSION['lastLoad'];
    Function humantime($timestamp){
$currentTime = time();
        $diff = $currentTime - $timestamp;
        $timePhrase = array('second','minute','hour','day','week','month','year','decade');
        $timeLimit = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600);
        for($i =sizeof($timeLimit)-1; ($i >=0)&&(($no =  $diff/$timeLimit[$i])<=1); $i--); if($i < 0) $i=0; $_time = $currentTime  -($diff%$timeLimit[$i]);
        $no = floor($no); if($no <> 1) $timePhrase[$i] .='s'; $value=sprintf("%d %s ",$no,$timePhrase[$i]);
        return $value.' ago ';
}
echo humantime($_SESSION['lastLoad']);
}
else {echo 'reload again';}
$_SESSION['lastLoad'] = time();

You can copy this code into a php script and play around with it, you'll love it. Below is a gif animation showing me running with script in a browser and waiting each time to elongate the reload time.

Feel free to comment and ask any question.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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