I was really surprised that I couldn't find an iOS date formatter which implemented the Facebook style "Time Ago" format so I whipped one up myself. I reverse engineered the Facebook format, so this should be pretty accurate. Feel free to use it in your projects / improve it.
Hope you enjoy :)
If you have any questions feel free to contact me here: www.nikilster.com/about.html
## Date Format < 1 minute = "Just now"
< 1 hour = "x minutes ago"
Today = "x hours ago"
Yesterday = "Yesterday at 1:28pm"
< Last 7 days = "Friday at 1:48am"
< Last 30 days = "March 30 at 1:14 pm"
< 1 year = "September 15"
Anything else = "September 9, 2011"
- This NSDate category adds the facebook style "time ago" date formatting.
- This mimics Facebook mobile (the desktop version has slightly different date formatting).
- This assumes all dates are in the past.
##To use this in your iOS project: 1. Drag both NSDate+NVTimeAgo.m aand NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h into your iOS project in XCode 2. In the files that you want to use this functionality in,itType:
#import "NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h"
somewhere near the top of your file.
-
Use the date formatter on a date by calling:
[date formattedAsTimeAgo]where date is an (NSDate *) and represents a date IN THE PAST (relative to now).
If you have a mysql datetime string and you want to convert it to the time ago format, do:
NSString *mysqlDatetime = <Get from the database> NSString *timeAgoFormattedDate = [NSDate mysqlDatetimeFormattedAsTimeAgo:mysqlDatetime];`
Nikil Viswanathan on 4/18/2013
You can contact me on: www.nikilster.com
## Credits Thanks to dellinger for making it into a CocoaPod.