Approximate Time Period with Joda-Time

Question

I am using Joda library to get time period passed since a given timestamp:

public static String getTimePassedSince(Date initialTimestamp){

        DateTime initDT = new DateTime(initialTimestamp.getTime());
        DateTime now = new DateTime();
        Period p = new Period(initDT, now);

        PeriodFormatter formatter = new PeriodFormatterBuilder()
            .appendYears().appendSuffix(" year, ", " years, ")
            .appendMonths().appendSuffix(" month, ", " months, ")
            .appendDays().appendSuffix(" day, ", " days, ")
            .appendHours().appendSuffix(" hour, ", " hours, ")
            .appendMinutes().appendSuffix(" minute, ", " minutes, ")
            .appendSeconds().appendSuffix(" second, ", " seconds")
            .printZeroNever()
            .toFormatter();

        return formatter.print(p);
    }

The function returns exact time period strings for given timestamps. For example:

3 minutes, 23 seconds
1 hour, 30 minutes, 57 seconds
1 day, 23 hours, 21 minutes, 19 seconds

Is there any way that I can get approximate time instead of exact? For example, if one minute and 30 seconds have passed since the initialTimestamp, it only returns 1.5 minutes. Similarly, if an hour and 35 minutes have passed, it returns about 1.5 hours instead of 1 hour, 35 minutes, xy seconds.

I know the string returned can be parsed and manipulated but I am looking for something more sophisticated.

Answer 1

Take a look on PrettyTime.

Answer 2

I think you'll need to create your own formatter for this, which looks at the period and determines what granularity you want to format it in, say for 63 seconds "1 minute", or for 3 hours 48 minutes: "3 hours". Sounds to me like you want to report only the one largest unit of time, and ignore the more granular ones. You'll need to define the rounding behavior and how to render times in days: "44 days ago" or "one month ago" or "1 month and 2 weeks ago".

I am not aware of any generic utility which does this, but I haven't looked for one either.