Converting DateTime to time ago in Dart/Flutter

Question

The question is how to format a Dart DateTime as a string stating the time elapsed similar to the way you see times displayed on Stack Overflow.

Is there any better method than this

String timeAgo(DateTime d) {  Duration diff = DateTime.now().difference(d);  if (diff.inDays > 365)   return "${(diff.inDays / 365).floor()} ${(diff.inDays / 365).floor() == 1 ? "year" : "years"} ago";  if (diff.inDays > 30)   return "${(diff.inDays / 30).floor()} ${(diff.inDays / 30).floor() == 1 ? "month" : "months"} ago";  if (diff.inDays > 7)   return "${(diff.inDays / 7).floor()} ${(diff.inDays / 7).floor() == 1 ? "week" : "weeks"} ago";  if (diff.inDays > 0)   return "${diff.inDays} ${diff.inDays == 1 ? "day" : "days"} ago";  if (diff.inHours > 0)   return "${diff.inHours} ${diff.inHours == 1 ? "hour" : "hours"} ago";  if (diff.inMinutes > 0)   return "${diff.inMinutes} ${diff.inMinutes == 1 ? "minute" : "minutes"} ago";  return "just now"; } 

Thank you and hope it helps others

Answer 1

I used timeago for the exact purpose and found it quite useful. It has multiple format and different languages support as well.

Answer 2

You can do this very easily using the default intl.dart method of Flutter

Import import 'package:intl/intl.dart'; package and get the time before date and time

So let's see how to do that, first create a TimeAgo class

import 'package:intl/intl.dart';  class TimeAgo{   static String timeAgoSinceDate(String dateString, {bool numericDates = true}) {     DateTime notificationDate = DateFormat("dd-MM-yyyy h:mma").parse(dateString);     final date2 = DateTime.now();     final difference = date2.difference(notificationDate);      if (difference.inDays > 8) {       return dateString;     } else if ((difference.inDays / 7).floor() >= 1) {       return (numericDates) ? '1 week ago' : 'Last week';     } else if (difference.inDays >= 2) {       return '${difference.inDays} days ago';     } else if (difference.inDays >= 1) {       return (numericDates) ? '1 day ago' : 'Yesterday';     } else if (difference.inHours >= 2) {       return '${difference.inHours} hours ago';     } else if (difference.inHours >= 1) {       return (numericDates) ? '1 hour ago' : 'An hour ago';     } else if (difference.inMinutes >= 2) {       return '${difference.inMinutes} minutes ago';     } else if (difference.inMinutes >= 1) {       return (numericDates) ? '1 minute ago' : 'A minute ago';     } else if (difference.inSeconds >= 3) {       return '${difference.inSeconds} seconds ago';     } else {       return 'Just now';     }   }  }  

And call it this way and get your desired output

TimeAgo.timeAgoSinceDate(item.created_date), // In this example, 09-10-2020 08:29AM date format is getting passed, but you can pass it in any format.