Laravel : Carbon shorten diffForHumans()

Question

How can we trim down diffForHumans() ?

Like $post->created_at->diffForHumans() return the time ago Like 3 days ago or 57 minutes ago, or 2 hours ago.

How can we be able to return 57 mins ago or 1W ago etc.

Is there any way around ?

Searched around but got nothing.

Answer 1

The third value passed to diffForHumans() is for shortening the display output.

Try something like,

$post->created_at->diffForHumans(null, false, true)

here you can see a the comments for diffForHumans() and the values it accepts.

---

     /**
     * Get the difference in a human readable format in the current locale.
     *
     * When comparing a value in the past to default now:
     * 1 hour ago
     * 5 months ago
     *
     * When comparing a value in the future to default now:
     * 1 hour from now
     * 5 months from now
     *
     * When comparing a value in the past to another value:
     * 1 hour before
     * 5 months before
     *
     * When comparing a value in the future to another value:
     * 1 hour after
     * 5 months after
     *
     * @param Carbon|null $other
     * @param bool        $absolute removes time difference modifiers ago, after, etc
     * @param bool        $short    displays short format of time units
     * @param int         $parts    displays number of parts in the interval
     *
     * @return string
     */
    public function diffForHumans($other = null, $absolute = false, $short = false, $parts = 1)
    {

Answer 2

Carbon implements different call-time configurations through magic methods. The universe of possible configurations are documented in the backing trait. Scanning through those methods, it looks like you want shortRelativeDiffForHumans:

$c = new Carbon\Carbon('now -1 day 4 hours');                                    
dump($c->diffForHumans(), $c->shortRelativeDiffForHumans());                     

"20 hours ago"
"20h ago"

Failing that, you can use str_replace or similar string functions to adjust the resulting value.

I'll note, in response to @Giovanni's contribution, that these magic methods are just verbose wrappers around the call to diffForHumans. I prefer these longer method names and their variations, because they're self-documenting. Using diffForHumans third argument of true doesn't tell me much when scanning code a year later!