Humanize for Java

Humanize is a Java facility for adding a “human touch” to data. It is thread-safe and supports per-thread internationalization.

The main modules are provided in two complementary variants:

humanize-slim

Lightweight distribution that only depends on Guava and standard Java APIs.

humanize-icu

Provides a concise facade for access to the International Components for Unicode (ICU) Java APIs. Includes the slim distribution.

Extensions

Unified Emoji — Easy Emoji handling for the JVM
Joda time — Joda time message format extensions
UCUM — Unified Units of Measurement
JSF — Java Server Faces converters
Taglib — JSP tag library

Getting Started

Maven

Current version:

<humanize.version>1.2.2</humanize.version>

Slim distribution:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.mfornos</groupId>
  <artifactId>humanize-slim</artifactId>
  <version>${humanize.version}</version>
</dependency>

Full-fledged ICU distribution:

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.github.mfornos</groupId>
  <artifactId>humanize-icu</artifactId>
  <version>${humanize.version}</version>
</dependency>

Usage

Using Humanize is quite simple.

Import the static methods of the Humanize class that you want to call.
Invoke these methods.

import static humanize.Humanize.binaryPrefix;

class SomeClass {

  void doSomething() {

    String size = binaryPrefix(1325899906842624L); // 1.18 PB

  }

}

Principal Methods

Date&Time

Method	Description	Output	Slim	ICU
naturalDay	For dates that are the current day or within one day, return ‘today’,‘tomorrow’ or ‘yesterday’, as appropriate.	‘today’, ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’ or the date formatted	✔	✔
naturalTime	Computes both past and future relative dates with optional precision.	‘2 days from now’, ‘3 decades ago’, ‘3 days 16 hours from now’, ‘3 minutes from now’, ‘3 days 15 hours 38 minutes ago’, ‘moments ago’, etc.	✔	✔
nanoTime	Formats a number of nanoseconds as the proper ten power unit.	‘1.5µs’, ‘10.51ms’, ‘30ns’, etc.	✔	-
duration	Formats a number of seconds as hours, minutes and seconds.	‘1 sec.’, ‘1:02:10’, etc.	✔	✔
smartDateFormat	Guesses the best locale-dependent pattern to format the date/time fields that the skeleton specifies.	skeleton ‘MMMd’ produces ‘11 Dec.’	-	✔
prettyTimeFormat	Returns a PrettyTime instance for the current thread.	-	✔	-

Frequencies

Method	Description	Output	Slim	ICU
times	Interprets numbers as occurrences.	‘never’, ‘once’, ‘5 times’, etc.	✔	-
paceFormat	Matches a pace (value and interval) with a logical time frame. Very useful for slow paces. e.g. heartbeats, ingested calories, hyperglycemic crises.	‘Approximately 7 times per day.’	✔	-

Numbers

Method	Description	Output	Slim	ICU
compactDecimal	Abbreviates numbers with short and long styles according to CLDR.	‘2,4 Mio’, ‘100K’, ‘1M’, ‘2 millones’, ‘100 Tsd’, ‘100 Millionen’, etc.	-	✔
ordinal	Converts a number to its ordinal as a string.	‘1st’, ‘2nd’, ‘3rd’, etc.	✔	✔
spellBigNumber	Converts a big number to a friendly text representation.	‘2.3 thousand’, ‘1 million’, ‘–1.55 billion’, ‘3 decillion’, ‘2 googol’, etc.	✔	-
spellDigit	For decimal digits, returns the number spelled out.	‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, etc.	✔	-
spellNumber	Converts the given number to words.	‘twenty-three’, ‘two thousand eight hundred and forty’, ‘one million four hundred and twelve thousand six hundred and five’, etc.	-	✔

Units

Method	Description	Output	Slim	ICU
binaryPrefix	Converts a given number to a string preceded by the corresponding binary International System of Units (SI) prefix.	‘2 bytes’, ‘1.5 KB’, ‘5 MB’, ‘1.18 PB’, etc.	✔	-
metricPrefix	Converts a given number to a string preceded by the corresponding decimal multiplicative prefix.	‘100k’, ‘1M’, ‘3.5M’, etc.	✔	-
formatCurrency	Smartly formats the given number as a monetary amount.	‘£34’, ‘£1,000’, ‘£12.50’, etc.	✔	✔
formatPluralCurrency	Smartly formats the given number as a monetary amount in plural form.	‘34 British pounds sterling’, ‘1,500.55 British pounds sterling’, ‘1 euro’, etc.	-	✔
formatPercent	Formats the given ratio as a percentage.	‘500%’, ‘56%’, etc.	✔	✔

Text

Method	Description	Output	Slim	ICU
pluralize	Applies the proper format for a given plural state.	-	✔	-
pluralizeFormat	Constructs a message with pluralization logic by the means of ChoiceFormat. Refer to messageFormat for pluralization using CLDR Plural Rules.	-	✔	-
camelize	Makes a phrase camel case. Spaces, hyphens, underscores and dots will be removed.	-	✔	-
capitalize	Capitalizes a string, smartly.	-	✔	-
decamelize	Converts a camel case string into a human-readable name.	-	✔	-
titleize	Creates a nice looking title, smartly.	-	✔	-
transliterate	Full transliteration support.	-	-	✔
simplify	Sort of poor man’s transliteration, i.e. normalizes and strips diacritical marks.	-	✔	-
unidecode	Just enough transliteration, unicode to ascii.	-	✔	-
slugify	Transforms a text into a representation suitable to be used in an URL (unicode friendly).	-	✔	-
mask	Formats the given text with the mask specified.	for ‘12345G’ with mask ‘__ __/’ produces ‘12 345/G’	✔	-
wordWrap	Truncate a string to the closest word boundary after a number of characters.	-	✔	-
messageFormat	Returns an ICU or extended MessageFormat instance for the current thread.	-	✔	✔
replaceSupplementary	Replaces characters outside the Basic Multilingual Plane with their name.	‘SMILING FACE WITH SMILING EYES’ for the corresponding Emoji char	✔	✔
oxford	Converts a list of items to a human readable string with an optional limit.	‘Oranges, Pears, Bananas, and 2 others’	✔	-

Documentation

Code Examples

Small set of code examples.

Date&Time

naturalTime(new Date());
// => "moments ago"

naturalTime(new Date(1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 1), new Date(0));
// => "1 day ago"

naturalTime(new Date(0), new Date(1000 * 60 * 12));
// => "12 minutes from now"

naturalTime(new Date(0), new Date(2629743830L * 3L));
// => "3 months from now"

// Fixed date for demonstration
Date moment = new Date(1000 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 3 + 1000 * 60 * 60 * 15 + 1000 * 60 * 38
                       + 1000 * 2);

naturalTime(new Date(0), moment, TimeMillis.HOUR)
// => "3 days 16 hours from now"

naturalTime(moment, new Date(0), TimeMillis.SECOND)
// => "3 days 15 hours 38 minutes ago"

Frequencies

paceFormat(1.75, TimeMillis.HOUR.millis());
// => "Approximately 2 times per hour."

paceFormat(0, TimeMillis.SECOND.millis());
// => "Never."

paceFormat(1, TimeMillis.WEEK.millis());
// => "Approximately one time per week."

times(0); // => "never"
times(1); // => "once"
times(2); // => "twice"
times(3); // => "3 times"

Text

Pluralize

pluralize("one", "{0}", "none", 1);  // => "one"
pluralize("one", "{0}", "none", 2);  // => "2"
pluralize("one", "{0}", "none", 0);  // => "none"

pluralize("one {1}.", "{0} {1}s.", "no {1}.", 1, "disk");  // => "one disk."
pluralize("one {1}.", "{0} {1}s.", "no {1}.", 2, "disk");  // => "2 disks."
pluralize("one {1}.", "{0} {1}s.", "no {1}.", 0, "disk");  // => "no disk."

Parameterized Pluralize

PluralizeParams p = PluralizeParams
                .begin("one {1}.")
                .many("{0} {1}s.")
                .none("no {1}.")
                .exts("disk");

pluralize(1, p); // => "one disk."
pluralize(2, p); // => "2 disks."
pluralize(0, p); // => "no disk."

Pluralize MessageFormat

MessageFormat msg = pluralizeFormat("There {0} on {1}.::are no files::is one file"
                                     + "::are {2} files");

msg.render(0, "disk");    // => "There are no files on disk."
msg.render(1, "disk");    // => "There is one file on disk."
msg.render(1000, "disk"); // => "There are 1,000 files on disk."

MessageFormat msg = pluralizeFormat("nothing::one thing::{0} things");

msg.render(-1); // => "nothing"
msg.render(0);  // => "nothing"
msg.render(1);  // => "one thing"
msg.render(2);  // => "2 things"

MessageFormat msg = pluralizeFormat("one thing::{0} things");

msg.render(-1); // => "-1 things"
msg.render(0);  // => "0 things"
msg.render(1);  // => "one thing"
msg.render(2);  // => "2 things"

Slugify

slugify("Cet été, j’en ai rien à coder");
// => "cet-ete-j-en-ai-rien-a-coder"

slugify("\nキャンパス//.Я_♥@борщ\n^abc");
// => "kiyanpasu-ia-borshch-abc"

Parse

Date & Time

parseISODateTime("2011-09-14T15:22:01Z");

parseISOTime("15:22:01Z");

parseSmartDate("1.2.12", "dd/MM/yy", "yyyy/MM/dd", "dd/MM/yyyy");

More Examples

Dependencies

Humanize-slim

guava 18.0
prettytime 3.2.5.Final
unidecode 0.0.7

Humanize-icu

humanize-slim ${humanize.version}
icu4j 54.1

Package size concerns

ICU

If you need customize the data included by default in the ICU distribution (all features and languages ~7.1MB), the ICU Data Library Customizer may be useful.

ProGuard

Using ProGuard with Guava.

Supported languages

humanize-slim naturalTime supports over 25 languages, see prettytime. Rest of methods have support for english and spanish.

humanize-icu all languages supported by the ICU APIs.

Custom languages

If you want to add support for other languages simply put a properties file named Humanize\_{your\_locale}.properties under the classpath i18n.

Extensible Message Formats

If you want to plug in your own formats then place a META-INF/services/humanize.spi.FormatProvider file inside your jar. This file must contain a list of the full qualified class names of your FormatProvider implementations, separated by carriage return. Also, you can register manually your format factories on the message formatter.

Built-in Humanize Extended Formats

Create a file META-INF/services/humanize.spi.FormatProvider with the following content:

humanize.text.HumanizeFormatProvider
humanize.text.MaskFormat

Now you can use it

Humanize.format("{0,humanize,ordinal} greetings", 1);
// => "1st greetings"

Cache configuration

By default the caches are configured to expire after 1 hour past the last access. If you want to change this behavior you need to provide a humanize.properties file, or specify the location of a properties file using the humanize.config system property, with a CacheBuilderSpec string configuration like this:

cache.builder.spec:expireAfterAccess=15m

The value must follow the CacheBuilderSpec syntax. The string syntax is a series of comma-separated keys or key-value pairs, each corresponding to a CacheBuilder method.

concurrencyLevel=[integer]: sets CacheBuilder.concurrencyLevel.
initialCapacity=[integer]: sets CacheBuilder.initialCapacity.
maximumSize=[long]: sets CacheBuilder.maximumSize.
maximumWeight=[long]: sets CacheBuilder.maximumWeight.
expireAfterAccess=[duration]: sets CacheBuilder.expireAfterAccess(long, java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit).
expireAfterWrite=[duration]: sets CacheBuilder.expireAfterWrite(long, java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit).
refreshAfterWrite=[duration]: sets CacheBuilder.refreshAfterWrite(long, java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit).
weakKeys: sets CacheBuilder.weakKeys().
softValues: sets CacheBuilder.softValues().
weakValues: sets CacheBuilder.weakValues().

Durations are represented by an integer, followed by one of “d”, “h”, “m”, or “s”, representing days, hours, minutes, or seconds respectively. (There is currently no syntax to request expiration in milliseconds, microseconds, or nanoseconds.)

Integrations

Handlebars Helper

Humanize is integrated in the awesome Handlebars.java project.

Have fun and stay fresh!

EOF

kassoulet/humanize

Humanize for Java

Extensions

Getting Started

Maven

Usage

Principal Methods

Date&Time

Frequencies

Numbers

Units

Text

Documentation

Code Examples

Date&Time

Frequencies

Text

Parse

More Examples

Dependencies

Humanize-slim

Humanize-icu

Package size concerns

Supported languages

Custom languages

Extensible Message Formats

Built-in Humanize Extended Formats

Cache configuration

Integrations

Handlebars Helper