Converting a unix time stamp to twitter/facebook style

Question

I'm trying to convert a unix time stamp to display like facebook and twitter. For example, when you see tweets or comments placed on twitter/facebook you see the date/time displayed like so:

'2 mins ago' or '2 days ago' or '2 weeks ago'

Does anyone one know of any function to get it working like this. I'm guessing it will be a custom one.

Any help is much appreciated

possible duplicate of [Converting timestamp to time ago in PHP e.g 1 day ago, 2 days ago...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1416697/converting-timestamp-to-time-ago-in-php-e-g-1-day-ago-2-days-ago) — Glavić, Nov 13 '13 at 22:20

score 22 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 13 '11 at 12:43

If you are using php you might want to try the following function which was posted by Matt Jones

http://www.mdj.us/web-development/php-programming/another-variation-on-the-time-ago-php-function-use-mysqls-datetime-field-type/

// DISPLAYS COMMENT POST TIME AS "1 year, 1 week ago" or "5 minutes, 7 seconds ago", etc...
function time_ago($date,$granularity=2) {
    $date = strtotime($date);
    $difference = time() - $date;
    $periods = array('decade' => 315360000,
        'year' => 31536000,
        'month' => 2628000,
        'week' => 604800, 
        'day' => 86400,
        'hour' => 3600,
        'minute' => 60,
        'second' => 1);

    foreach ($periods as $key => $value) {
        if ($difference >= $value) {
            $time = floor($difference/$value);
            $difference %= $value;
            $retval .= ($retval ? ' ' : '').$time.' ';
            $retval .= (($time > 1) ? $key.'s' : $key);
            $granularity--;
        }
        if ($granularity == '0') { break; }
    }
    return ' posted '.$retval.' ago';      
}

that's it! Completely what I want. – Fatih Aytekin Apr 30 '16 at 12:43 — Fatih Aytekin, Apr 30 '16 at 12:43

score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Jul 13 '11 at 15:52

I also like the jquery timeago plugin which will automatically update all time fields on a set timer so it is up to date if the user stays on a page for a while. You would need to convert the unix time to ISO 8601 format when rendering but I believe there is a php function for that.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 18 '18 at 20:35

Simple script that takes time in seconds and works great

function twitter_time($time) {
  $delta = time() - strtotime($time);
  if ($delta < 60) {
    return '30sec ago';
  } else if ($delta < 120) {
    return '1m ago';
  } else if ($delta < (60 * 60)) {
    return floor($delta / 60) . 'm ago';
  } else if ($delta < (120 * 60)) {
    return '1h ago';
  } else if ($delta < (24 * 60 * 60)) {
    return floor($delta / 3600) . 'h ago';
  } else if ($delta < (48 * 60 * 60)) {
    return '1d ago';
  } else if ($delta < (86400*7)) {
    return floor($delta / 86400) . 'd ago';
  } else if ($delta < (2*86400*7)) {
    return '1week ago';
  } else if ($delta < (2592000)) {
    return floor($delta / (86400*7)) . 'weeks ago';
  } else if ($delta < (2*2592000)) {
    return '1mon ago';
  } else if ($delta < (31104000)) {
    return floor($delta / 2592000) . 'mon ago';
  } else if ($delta < (2*31104000)) {
    return '1year ago';
  } else {
    return number_format(floor($delta / 31104000)) . 'years ago';
  } 
}

Converting a unix time stamp to twitter/facebook style

3 Answers3