How to Format Time Elapsed in Natural Language in JavaScript?

Formatting Time Elapsed in Natural Language

When displaying timestamps, it can be more user-friendly to express the elapsed time in natural language, such as "4 minutes ago" instead of "2023-03-08 14:05:03". This article demonstrates how to format JavaScript Date objects in this concise and readable manner.

The provided function, timeSince, calculates the difference between the current date and a given date. It then categorizes the elapsed time into years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds based on the number of seconds passed.

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

  var interval = seconds / 31536000;

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

For example:

var aDay = 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000;
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now() - aDay))); // "1 day ago"
console.log(timeSince(new Date(Date.now() - aDay * 2))); // "2 days ago"

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