Convert 2010-04-16 16:30:00 to “Tomorrow Afternoon”

Question

Convert 2010-04-16 16:30:00 to \"Tomorrow Afternoon\" or convert another date to \"this afternoon\", \"next year\", \"next week wednesday\". You get the picture. Anyone know

Answer 1

There might be more elegant solutions out there (look for Natural language formatting), but personally I couldn't find any.

I would suggest calculating the distance from now to the date you're formatting, and using thresholds.

Pseudo solution:

diff = now - date

if (diff < one_day) 
    format for today
if (diff < two_days) 
    format for tomorrow
if (diff < one_week)
    format using days from now
.
.
.

The comparison will work for both past and future dates, as long as you use compare with the abs value of diff. Display timeunit ago or timeunit from now by checking if diff is positive or negative.

For the morning, afternoon, evening etc. you only need to check for the time of day in the date, and regarding the formatting type you hit, either display the time as numbers (far away), or natural language (recent or near date).