User-friendly time format in Python?

Question

Python: I need to show file modification times in the \"1 day ago\", \"two hours ago\", format.

Is there something ready to do that? It should be in English.

Answer 1

I've been dragging and tweaking this code from programming language to programming language for so long, I don't remember where I originally got it from. It served me well in PHP, Java, and TypeScript, and now it's time for Python.

It handles past and future dates, as well as edge cases.

def unix_time() -> int:
    return int(time.time())


def pretty_time(t: int, absolute=False) -> str:
    if not type(t) is int:
        return "N/A"
    if t == 0:
        return "Never"

    now = unix_time()
    if t == now:
        return "Now"

    periods = ["second", "minute", "hour", "day", "week", "month", "year", "decade"]
    lengths = [60, 60, 24, 7, 4.35, 12, 10]

    diff = now - t

    if absolute:
        suffix = ""
    else:
        if diff >= 0:
            suffix = "ago"
        else:
            diff *= -1
            suffix = "remaining"

    i = 0
    while diff >= lengths[i] and i < len(lengths) - 1:
        diff /= lengths[i]
        i += 1

    diff = round(diff)
    if diff > 1:
        periods[i] += "s"

    return "{0} {1} {2}".format(diff, periods[i], suffix)