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 tag

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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