Relative Date in Moment.js using .fromNow() - how to get together years, months and days ago?

Question

1. Let's say I have a date string 2015-02-01 - (1st Feb 2015)
2. Today we have 2016-07-02 (2nd Jul 2016)

We can easily see that the older date took place approximately 1 year and 5 months and 1 day ago.

I wanted to achieve relative result like that using Moment.js, so I did:

return moment('2015-02-01).fromNow();

Unfortunately, library rounds the result and I get a year ago, where almost half of the next year is ignored (missing 5 months and 1 day).

The only available boolean argument passed to .fromNow() is nothing that can help. Is it possible to get full relative date where I could control breakdown even to hours, minutes and seconds if needed?

Answer 1

You have a couple options depending on what direction you want to go with this. Probably the most straightforward is to use a duration instead of .fromNow().

Just do:

var diff = moment('2015-02-01').diff(moment(), 'milliseconds');
var duration = moment.duration(diff);

This gets you a duration type in moment, which you can get lots of information from. For example:

duration.years(); //-1
duration.months(); //-4
duration.days();// -30
duration.hours(); //-8

Or if you want the units in aggregate:

duration.asYears(); //-1.416481451250425
duration.asMonths(); //-16.997784898617585

And so on. You can format this however you would like.

If you would like more advanced duration formatting you can check out this plugin.