iPhone: Convert date string to a relative time stamp

Question

I\'ve got a timestamp as a string like:

Thu, 21 May 09 19:10:09 -0700

and I\'d like to convert it to a relative time stamp like

Answer 1

I saw that there were several time ago functions in snippets of code on Stack Overflow and I wanted one that really gave the clearest sense of the time (since some action occurred). To me this means "time ago" style for short time intervals (5 min ago, 2 hours ago) and specific dates for longer time periods (April 15, 2011 instead of 2 years ago). Basically I thought Facebook did a really good job at this and I wanted to just go by their example (as I'm sure they out a lot of thought into this and it is very easy and clear to understand from the consumer perspective).

After a long time of googling I was pretty surprised to see that no one had implemented this as far as I could tell. Decided that I wanted it bad enough to spend the time writing and thought that I would share.

Hope you enjoy :)

Get the code here: https://github.com/nikilster/NSDate-Time-Ago