Best way to format a date relative to now on Android

Question

I am creating a feature in an Android app to get an arbitrary date (past, present or future) and find the difference relative to now.

Both my now and

Answer 1

So your computation is based on milliseconds unit, then you format the result with SimpleDateFormat.

For this, you can easily use SimpleDateFormat formatter like this :

Date date = new Date(milliseconds);
SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("EEEE dd MMMM yyyy");
String strDate = formatter.format(date);

So your computation should be based on milliseconds unit, then you format the result with SimpleDateFormat.

The pattern ("EEEE dd MMMM yyyy") allows you to get a date format like Monday, 04 February 2013.

You can change the pattern as you like : "EEEE dd/MM/yy", ...