Displaying dates for humans with human_date gem
I've just released a gem called human_date which makes it really easy to display dates in a human format in your Rails application.
I've been using these helpers for quite a while in different projects, so I decided to extract them into a gem.
Usage
With Date objects
date = Date.current # 2012-12-21
human_date(date) # Today
human_date(date + 1.day) # Tomorrow
human_date(date - 1.day) # Yesterday
human_date(date - 2.days) # Dec 19
human_date(date - 1.year) # Dec 21, 2011
With Time objects
time = Time.now # 2012-08-28 17:20:54
human_time(time) # 5:20 pm
# For Time objects, the default value for :today is `"%l:%M %p"`
human_time(time - 1.day) # Yesterday
HTML5
There is also a helper for creating HTML5 <time>
tag:
human_time_tag(date, pubdate: true)
# <time datetime="2012-12-21" pubdate="pubdate">Today</time>
I18n
The default values are perfectly fine but if you want to customize the output, it is pretty easy.
human_date provides with five formats for Date and Time objects:
:today
:tomorrow
:yesterday
:current_year
by default shows the month and the date:Dec 19
:other_year
by default shows the year as well:Dec 21, 2011
You can easily customize them:
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
date:
formats:
today: "Today"
tomorrow: "Tomorrow"
yesterday: "Yesterday"
current_year: "%h %e"
other_year: "%h %e, %Y"
time:
formats:
today: "%l:%M %p"
Namespaces
You might want to have different formats for different models, for example for a Post
published today you'll want to display Today
but for a Comment
you might want to be more precise and display the actual time: 5:20 pm
.
This is easy to achieve with namespaces:
# config/locales/en.yml
en:
posts:
time:
formats:
today: "Today"
comments:
time:
formats:
today: "%l:%M %p"
And then:
time = Time.now # 2012-08-28 17:20:54
human_time(time, :posts) # Today
human_time(time, :comments) # 5:20 pm
Fork it at http://github.com/AlexanderZaytsev/human_date
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