How to format time since xxx e.g. “4 minutes ago” similar to Stack Exchange sites

Question

The question is how to format a JavaScript Date as a string stating the time elapsed similar to the way you see times displayed on Stack Overflow.

e.g.

• 1 minute ago
• 1 hour ago
• 1 day ago
• 1 month ago
• 1 year ago

Answer 1

function timeSince(date) {

    var seconds = Math.floor((new Date() - date) / 1000);

    var interval = Math.floor(seconds / 31536000);

    if (interval > 1) {
        return interval + " years";
    }
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 2592000);
    if (interval > 1) {
        return interval + " months";
    }
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 86400);
    if (interval > 1) {
        return interval + " days";
    }
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 3600);
    if (interval > 1) {
        return interval + " hours";
    }
    interval = Math.floor(seconds / 60);
    if (interval > 1) {
        return interval + " minutes";
    }
    return Math.floor(seconds) + " seconds";
}

Answer 2

I haven't checked (although it wouldn't be hard to), but I think that Stack Exchange sites use the jquery.timeago plugin to create these time strings.

---

It's quite easy to use the plugin, and it's clean and updates automatically.

Here's a quick sample (from the plugin's home page):

First, load jQuery and the plugin:

<script src="jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="jquery.timeago.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now, let's attach it to your timestamps on DOM ready:

jQuery(document).ready(function() {
jQuery("abbr.timeago").timeago(); });

This will turn all abbr elements with a class of timeago and an ISO 8601 timestamp in the title: <abbr class="timeago" title="2008-07-17T09:24:17Z">July 17, 2008</abbr> into something like this: <abbr class="timeago" title="July 17, 2008">about a year ago</abbr> which yields: about a year ago. As time passes, the timestamps will automatically update.