How to evaluate a date difference in years, months and days (ruby)?

Question

I have to make a simple difference between two dates:

Date.parse("2009-06-20") - Date.today

This gives me the difference of the dates in days.

Anyone know a way to easily convert that to the following format:

The event occurred X years, Y months and Z days ago

Thank you.

Answer 1

You may be looking for distance_of_times_in_words

Answer 2

I don't know of any standard, correct way to do this. As odd as it may seem the standard Ruby library has a Date class but no DateSpan functionality. Rails has a solution but it feels somewhat of a pain for me to require this whole mammoth for such a trivial task.

Answer 3

This is an example for difference in days, hours, seconds. Add the fields that you need.

def calculate_difference
  minutes = (Date.parse("2009-06-20") - Date.today).to_i / 60
  days = minutes / (24*60)
  minutes -= days * 24*60
  hours = minutes / 60
  minutes -= hours * 60
  "#{days}d#{hours}h#{minutes}m"
end

Answer 4

Found the answer here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1224613/more-precise-distance-of-time-in-words

with this plugin:

https://github.com/radar/dotiw/tree