Human readable date reference in PHP, e.g. "last monday"

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Human-readable, current time sensitive date and time formatting in PHP
Human Readable Date Using PHP

I'm looking for a way to generate human readable date references, in conversational style, such as the following:

diff( '2012-05-15', '2012-05-21' ) == "last Tuesday"
diff( '2012-05-15', '2012-05-16' ) == "yesterday"
diff( '2012-05-15', '2012-05-17' ) == "on Tuesday"
diff( '2012-04-11', '2012-05-21' ) == "on the 11th of April"

I looked into strtotime(), which seems to do the inverse of what I want. The solution doesn't need to work with future dates, just past dates. I saw another question asking the same thing for future dates in JavaScript, but it didn't really solve my problem.

Any ideas?

There's nothing like that built into PHP. It shouldn't be too hard to custom code a bunch of cases though. `if (date == today - 1) "yesterday" else (date <= +1 week) "on " . weekday`... — deceze, May 21 '12 at 08:34
@Juhana That question is basically asking for a glorified datediff. It's unrelated. — Polynomial, May 21 '12 at 08:41
@deceze I was hoping to avoid that - there are some ugly corner cases when dealing with weeks. — Polynomial, May 21 '12 at 08:41
@Polynomial you linked to a similiar question that does solve the described problem. What's wrong with that solution, except for you need to add 'on' word? — meze, May 21 '12 at 08:44
@meze It's in JavaScript, not PHP, and it's also focusing on future dates, not past. It also doesn't cover the other cases I listed. — Polynomial, May 21 '12 at 08:47
@Polynomial the accepted answer is in PHP and it does cover all cases, even future dates. (ok, maybe the last case needs an additional if). — meze, May 21 '12 at 08:49
@meze Oh, so it does! My bad. I blame the fact that I missed my morning coffee. — Polynomial, May 21 '12 at 08:50
@Polynomial deleted my answer. misunderstood the exact nature of your question. sorry about that :) — Darragh Enright, May 21 '12 at 08:52

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 11:44

I think PHP: producing relative date/time from timestamps is what you are looking for:

This is the code from the accepted answer to this question (copied it here since the original question just links to a pastebin):

function time2str($ts)
{
    if(!ctype_digit($ts))
        $ts = strtotime($ts);

    $diff = time() - $ts;
    if($diff == 0)
        return 'now';
    elseif($diff > 0)
    {
        $day_diff = floor($diff / 86400);
        if($day_diff == 0)
        {
            if($diff < 60) return 'just now';
            if($diff < 120) return '1 minute ago';
            if($diff < 3600) return floor($diff / 60) . ' minutes ago';
            if($diff < 7200) return '1 hour ago';
            if($diff < 86400) return floor($diff / 3600) . ' hours ago';
        }
        if($day_diff == 1) return 'Yesterday';
        if($day_diff < 7) return $day_diff . ' days ago';
        if($day_diff < 31) return ceil($day_diff / 7) . ' weeks ago';
        if($day_diff < 60) return 'last month';
        return date('F Y', $ts);
    }
    else
    {
        $diff = abs($diff);
        $day_diff = floor($diff / 86400);
        if($day_diff == 0)
        {
            if($diff < 120) return 'in a minute';
            if($diff < 3600) return 'in ' . floor($diff / 60) . ' minutes';
            if($diff < 7200) return 'in an hour';
            if($diff < 86400) return 'in ' . floor($diff / 3600) . ' hours';
        }
        if($day_diff == 1) return 'Tomorrow';
        if($day_diff < 4) return date('l', $ts);
        if($day_diff < 7 + (7 - date('w'))) return 'next week';
        if(ceil($day_diff / 7) < 4) return 'in ' . ceil($day_diff / 7) . ' weeks';
        if(date('n', $ts) == date('n') + 1) return 'next month';
        return date('F Y', $ts);
    }
}

This is a relative difference between the dates. The OP wants "human date". (i.e, "on the 11th of June", not "next month"). — meze, May 21 '12 at 08:45

Human readable date reference in PHP, e.g. "last monday"

1 Answers1

Linked