In Rails, display time between two dates in English

Question

In a Rails project I want to find the difference between two dates and then display it in natural language. Something like

>> (date1 - date2).to_natural_language 
"3 years, 2 months, 1 week, 6 days"

Basically this for ruby.

Google and the Rails API haven't turned up anything. I've found some things that will give you the difference in one unit (ie, how many weeks between two dates) but not something that will accurately calculate years, months, weeks, days all together.

Answer 1

The Rails' ActionView module includes two methods that may do what you require:

• distance_of_time_in_words
• distance_of_time_in_words_to_now