Facebook Style Formatting of Dates (Time Ago)

I was really surprised that I couldn't find an iOS date formatter which implemented the Facebook style "Time Ago" format so I whipped one up myself. I reverse engineered the Facebook format, so this should be pretty accurate. Feel free to use it in your projects / improve it.

Hope you enjoy :)

If you have any questions feel free to contact me here: www.nikilster.com/about.html

Date Format

< 1 minute             =   "Just now"

< 1 hour                 = "x minutes ago"

Today                    = "x hours ago"

Yesterday              = "Yesterday at 1:28pm"

< Last 7 days         = "Friday at 1:48am"

< Last 30 days       = "March 30 at 1:14 pm"

< 1 year                 = "September 15"

Anything else         = "September 9, 2011"

About

• This NSDate category adds the facebook style "time ago" date formatting.
• This mimics Facebook mobile (the desktop version has slightly different date formatting).
• This assumes all dates are in the past.

To use this in your iOS project:

1. Drag both NSDate+NVTimeAgo.m aand NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h into your iOS project in XCode

2. In the files that you want to use this functionality in,itType:

   #import "NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h"
   

   somewhere near the top of your file.

3. Use the date formatter on a date by calling:

   [date formattedAsTimeAgo]
   

   where date is an (NSDate *) and represents a date IN THE PAST (relative to now).

   If you have a mysql datetime string and you want to convert it to the time ago format, do:

   NSString *mysqlDatetime = <Get from the database>
   NSString *timeAgoFormattedDate = [NSDate mysqlDatetimeFormattedAsTimeAgo:mysqlDatetime];`
   

Created By

Nikil Viswanathan on 4/18/2013

You can contact me on: www.nikilster.com

Credits

Thanks to dellinger for making it into a CocoaPod.