Java pretty dates

First of all, sorry for not posting as frequently as before. I’m feverishly working on a new project with a really tight deadline and I don’t have as much time as I previously did.

For reasons that are irrelevant to this post, I have to write lots of Java code. So, sorry if I disappoint my fellow readers, but this post isn’t about JavaScript or CSS, it’s about Java. I wanted to display “pretty dates” (a bit like Twitter’s, for example “yesterday”, “5 minutes ago”, “last year” and so on) in a few places and I couldn’t find a Java implementation, so I decided to code my own.

For anyone that might need it, here it is:

 import java.util.Date; /** * Class for human-readable, pretty date formatting * @author Lea Verou */ public class PrettyDate { private Date date; public PrettyDate() { this(new Date()); } public PrettyDate(Date date) { this.date = date; } public String toString() { long current = (new Date()).getTime(), timestamp = date.getTime(), diff = (current - timestamp)/1000; int amount = 0; String what = ""; /** * Second counts * 3600: hour * 86400: day * 604800: week * 2592000: month * 31536000: year */ if(diff > 31536000) { amount = (int)(diff/31536000); what = "year"; } else if(diff > 2592000) { amount = (int)(diff/2592000); what = "month"; } else if(diff > 604800) { amount = (int)(diff/604800); what = "week"; } else if(diff > 86400) { amount = (int)(diff/86400); what = "day"; } else if(diff > 3600) { amount = (int)(diff/3600); what = "hour"; } else if(diff > 60) { amount = (int)(diff/60); what = "minute"; } else { amount = (int)diff; what = "second"; if(amount < 6) { return "Just now"; } } if(amount == 1) { if(what.equals("day")) { return "Yesterday"; } else if(what.equals("week") || what.equals("month") || what.equals("year")) { return "Last " + what; } } else { what += "s"; } return amount + " " + what + " ago"; } }  

Hope someone finds it useful. :)