iOS - Friendly NSDate format

Question

I need to display the date of posts in my app to the user, right now I do it in this format: "Fri, 25 May". How would I format an NSDate to read something like "2 hours ago"? To make it more user friendly.

Answer 1

Take a look at FormaterKit https://github.com/mattt/FormatterKit

Created by mattt who also created AFNetworking.

Answer 2

NSDateFormatter can't do things like that; you're going to need to establish your own rules. I guess something like:

- (NSString *)formattedDate:(NSDate *)date
{
     NSTimeInterval timeSinceDate = [[NSDate date] timeIntervalSinceDate:date];

     // print up to 24 hours as a relative offset
     if(timeSinceDate < 24.0 * 60.0 * 60.0)
     {
         NSUInteger hoursSinceDate = (NSUInteger)(timeSinceDate / (60.0 * 60.0));

         switch(hoursSinceDate)
         {
              default: return [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%d hours ago", hoursSinceDate];
              case 1: return @"1 hour ago";
              case 0:
                  NSUInteger minutesSinceDate = (NSUInteger)(timeSinceDate / 60.0);
                  /* etc, etc */
              break;
         }
     }
     else
     {
          /* normal NSDateFormatter stuff here */
     }
}

So that's to print 'x minutes ago' or 'x hours ago' up to 24 hours from the date, which will usually be one day.

Answer 3

I wanted a date format like Facebook does for their mobile apps so I whipped up this NSDate category - hope it is useful for someone (this kind of stuff should really be in a standard library!) :)

https://github.com/nikilster/NSDate-Time-Ago