Using Carbon to return a human readable datetime difference

Question

I'm using Laravel 4 to create my project.

I am currently building the comments section and I want to display how long ago the post was created, kind of like Facebook's '10 mins ago' & '2 weeks ago' etc.

I have done a little bit of research and found that a package called Carbon can do this.

After reading the Laravel doc's, it says:

By default, Eloquent will convert the created_at, updated_at, and deleted_at columns to instances of Carbon, which provides an assortment of helpful methods, and extends the native PHP DateTime class.

But when I return a date column that I have created, it doesn't display it like on Facebook.

The code that I'm using is:

return array('time');

Has any body used this Carbon package that could give me a hand in doing what I need, I'm quite confused.

Answer 1

If you read the Carbon docs to get what you want you call the diffForHumans() method.

<?php echo \Carbon\Carbon::createFromTimeStamp(strtotime($comment->created_at))->diffForHumans() ?>

Answer 2

By default, Eloquent will convert the created_at, updated_at, and deleted_at columns to instances of Carbon. So, your code should be just like this:

$comment->created_at->diffForHumans();

It's very cool. It'll produce string like 2 minutes ago or 1 day ago. Plurar or singular, seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years, it runs automatically. I've tested it on Laravel version 4.1.24.

Answer 3

For any version of Laravel

$message->updated_at->diffForHumans();

Answer 4

Carbon::parse($p->created_at)->diffForHumans();

Answer 5

use this code for time ago :

    public function time_elapsed_string($datetime, $full = false) {
    $now = new DateTime;
    $ago = new DateTime($datetime);
    $diff = $now->diff($ago);

    $diff->w = floor($diff->d / 7);
    $diff->d -= $diff->w * 7;

    $string = array(
         'y' => 'year',
         'm' => 'month',
         'w' => 'week',
         'd' => 'day',
         'h' => 'hour',
         'i' => 'minute',
         's' => 'second',
     );
     foreach ($string as $k => &$v) {
         if ($diff->$k) {
             $v = $diff->$k . ' ' . $v . ($diff->$k > 1 ? 's' : '');
         } else {
             unset($string[$k]);
         }
     }

     if (!$full) $string = array_slice($string, 0, 1);
     return $string ? implode(', ', $string) . ' ago' : 'just now';
 }