How do I get the difference of time in human readable format with Laravel 5?

Question

I want to display the difference between the current date and time with the one stored in the updated_at column. However, I want it to be human-friendly like:

53 mins ago 2 hours ago 3 days ago 

Is there a function out there that I could use to make it easier?

To be sure that you understand me, let's say I have a column (updated_at) in my database which is equal to 2015-06-22 20:00:03 and the current time is 20:00:28. Then I'd like to see:

25 mins ago 

When it's higher than 59 minutes, I want to show only hours and when it's higher than 24 hours I'd like to see how many days ago.

Answer 1

By default, Eloquent converts created_at and updated_at columns to instances of Carbon. So if you are fetching the data using Eloquent, then you can do it as below.

$object->updated_at->diffForHumans(); 

If you want to customize the fields that will be mutated automatically, then within your model, you can customize them as you wish.

// Carbon instance fields protected $dates = ['created_at', 'updated_at', 'deleted_at']; 

Answer 2

incase of the date is in a string format, use laravel Carbon; e.g,

 {{ \Carbon\Carbon::parse($on_revision->assignment->deadline)->diffForhumans() }} 

Notice how I wrap my string in the carbon::parse()