Humanizing time

Question

I have a number of products that are perishable. Therefore, each product has an attribute called hours_expiration that tells how many hours the product can be used before it goes bad.

For ex, apple expires in 168 hours; nut expires in 4320 hours.

Given, the product's hours-to-expiration and the current time (Time.now or Date.now), how can I humanize the time-to-expiration in some of the following sample ways?

Your item is set to expire in about:

• 6 months and 14 days
• 1 month and 13 days
• 1 month and 1 day
• 27 days
• 1 day
• 23 hours
• 1 hour
• 50 minutes
• 1 minute

Looking for something robust and simple!

Answer 1

Another easy helper is time_ago_in_words: https://apidock.com/rails/ActionView/Helpers/DateHelper/time_ago_in_words

The method name might sound like it can only deal with past dates but actually it handles future dates just fine. You can try it in your rails console:

expiration_date = Time.now + 5.days 
puts "Expires in #{helper.time_ago_in_words(expiration_date)}"

"Expires in 5 days"