Human friendly date descriptions with NSDate on iOS

Question

I want to display NSDates in a \"human-friendly way\", such as \"last week\", or \"a few days ago\". Something similar to Pretty Time for Java.

What\'s the best way

Answer 1

Use the DateTools (github/Cocoapods) timeAgoSinceNow function. Here's some sample output...

NSDate.init(timeIntervalSinceNow:-3600).timeAgoSinceNow() "An hour ago" NSDate.init(timeIntervalSinceNow:-3600*24).timeAgoSinceNow() "Yesterday" NSDate.init(timeIntervalSinceNow:-3600*24*6).timeAgoSinceNow() "6 days ago" NSDate.init(timeIntervalSinceNow:-3600*24*7*3).timeAgoSinceNow() "3 weeks ago" NSDate.init(timeIntervalSinceNow:-3600*24*31*3).timeAgoSinceNow() "3 months ago"

The timeAgoSinceDate function is also handy.

DateTools supports many (human) languages and gives much better relative descriptions than NSDateFormatter's somewhat limited doesRelativeDateFormatting.