humanTime

humanTime is a super lightweight module aimed at formating time and date in a human readable format, à la Tweeter. Time is expressed:

• in minutes if date < 1 hour (3 min, 10 min…),
• in hours if date < 24 hours (1 h, 6 h…),
• with a localized string if more than 24 hours ago (12 décembre, December 12…)
• with a localized string mentionning the year if not the same year as we are (12 décembre 2014, December 12, 2014…)

Under the hood

The module takes advantage of modern browsers' Intl capabilities. It allows for an extremely lightweight lib (less than 1kB gzipped) as there is no need to embbed explicit translation and formating rules.

Intl support is quite broad so there's no need to polyfill if you're targetting reasonably modern browsers.

Installation & usage

npm install humantime

// require using commonJS
const humanTime = require('humantime');
 
// or in es6, using a module bundler like webpack
import humanTime from 'humantime';
 
// you can pass the function either a plain string
const formattedDateStr = humanTime('2017-11-18T10:11:47.232Z');
 
// or a Date object
const formattedDateObj = humanTime(new Date());
 
// alternatively, you can set the locale argument
// it defaults to default with latin numbers
// https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/Intl#locales_argument
const formattedDateObjFrenchCanadian = humanTime(new Date(), 'fr-CA');

That's all there is to know!

Contributing

There's sure room for improvement, so feel free to hack around and submit PRs! Please just follow the style of the existing code, which is Airbnb's style with minor modifications.

To maintain things clear and visual, please follow the git commit template.