humanTime

humanTime is a super lightweight module aimed at formating time and date in a human readable format, à la Tweeter. Time is expressed:

• in minutes if date < 1 hour (3 min, 10 min…),
• in hours if date < 24 hours (1 h, 6 h…),
• with a localized string if more than 24 hours ago (12 décembre, December 12…)
• with a localized string mentionning the year if not the same year as we are (12 décembre 2014, December 12, 2014…)

This default behaviour can be changed by using the options object.

Installation & usage

npm install humantime

import humanTime from 'humantime';

// you can pass the function either a plain string
const formattedDateStr = humanTime('2017-11-18T10:11:47.232Z');

// or a Date object
const formattedDateObj = humanTime(new Date());

// options allow you to define the module's behaviour
const formattedDateObjFrenchCanadian = humanTime(new Date(), {
    locale: 'fr-FR',
    disableRelative: true
});

The options object

• locale defaults to the browser default with latin numbers, but you can pass any ISO language code or any Locales supported by the Intl api
• year, day and month define the display format as per the DateTimeFormat options
• forceYear (bool) to force display the year even when it's the current year
• disableRelative (bool) to always display absolute dates

That's all there is to know!

Under the hood

The module takes advantage of modern browsers' Intl capabilities. It allows for an extremely lightweight lib (less than 1kB gzipped) as there is no need to embbed explicit translation and formating rules.

Intl support is quite broad so there's no need to polyfill if you're targetting reasonably modern browsers.

Contributing

There's sure room for improvement, so feel free to hack around and submit PRs! Please just follow the style of the existing code, which is Airbnb's style with minor modifications.

To maintain things clear and visual, please follow the git commit template.