How much time has passed?
Two weeks have passed since I started my JavaScript Marathon along with writing this blog! Time to celebrate.
Just yesterday, I worked with Dates in JavaScript. So to celebrate this day, I created a universal function, which tells you the time that has passed from any moment in the past till the present moment. Let’s go!
Here we go. Let’s create a function, which would take any Date as an argument and return us the information on how long ago it happened:
function analyzeDate(date) {
var now = new Date();
var diff = Math.round(now - date);
if ( diff < 1000 ) {
return('Now');
} else if ( diff >= 1000 && diff < 60*1000) {
return( diff/1000 +' seconds ago');
} else if ( diff >= 60000 && diff < 60*60*1000) {
return ( diff/60000 +' minutes ago'); // 55 minutes ago
} else {
return reformatDate(date);
}
}As an additional feature, I’d like to change the Date output into European format so it is presented as dd.mm.yy hh:mm:
function reformatDate(date) {
var fullDate = [];
var fullTime = [];
var day = date.getDate()+'';
var month = date.getMonth()+1+'';
var year = date.getFullYear()+'';
var hours = date.getHours()+'';
var minutes = date.getMinutes()+'';
if (day.length <2) { day = '0'+day; }
if (month.length <2) { month = '0'+month; }
if (year.length < 2) { year = '0'+year;}
if (hours.length <2) { hours = '0'+hours; }
if (minutes.length < 2) { minutes = '0'+minutes;}
fullDate.push(day);
fullDate.push(month);
fullDate.push( year.slice(-2) );
fullTime.push(hours);
fullTime.push(minutes);
return fullDate.join('.')+' '+fullTime.join(':');
}Now, to check the result, let’s alert the following cases:
alert( analyzeDate( new Date(new Date - 1) ) );
alert( analyzeDate( new Date(new Date - 30*1000) ) );
alert( analyzeDate( new Date(new Date- 5*60*1000) ) );
alert( analyzeDate( new Date(new Date - 86400*1000) ) );You may try it live at JSFiddle or by clicking “Results” below: