I’m building a site and was looking for a PHP function to say in words how long ago stuff was posted. I couldn’t find one, so I made one based on a JavaScript function my brother dug up.

So, now there is one for the next preson to find. This is also very easy to change to any language; I use it in Swedish.

function time_since($original) {
// accepts a datestring in any format, or a unix timestamp.
  $original = strtotime($original);

  $today = time();
  $distanceInSeconds = $today - $original;

  $distanceInMinutes = round($distanceInSeconds / 60);

  if ($distanceInMinutes < = 1) {
    if ($distanceInSeconds < 30)
      return "less than 20 seconds ago";
    if ($distanceInSeconds < 40)
      return "half a minute ago";
    if ($distanceInSeconds < 60)
      return "less than a minute ago";
    return "1 minute ago";
  }

  if ($distanceInMinutes < 45)
    return "$distanceInMinutes minutes ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 90)
    return "about an hour ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 1440)
    return round($distanceInMinutes / 60)." hours ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 2880)
    return "1 day ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 43200)
    return round($distanceInMinutes / 1440)." days ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 86400)
    return "about a month ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 525600)
    return round($distanceInMinutes / 43200)." months ago";
  if ($distanceInMinutes < 1051200)
    return "about a year ago";
  return round($distanceInMinutes / 525600)." years ago";
}