Saturday, August 13, 2011

Thursday, August 4, 2011

ServerSide JavaScript Date Nonsense

Hi.

I want to format some dates in my Express views.

First of all, my employer, i.TV, has a DateTime library that we wrote that is alright:
https://gist.github.com/1125717

But I was hoping this would be something that's more in the view layer than than in the model/controller level.

Here are some libraries and functions that do some version of that:
http://www.datejs.com/
https://github.com/Flamefork/underscore.date
https://github.com/cdcarter/commonjs-date-formatting
http://timeago.yarp.com/

However, none of them did what I wanted. Here is one that did:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-pretty-date/

This is what I did to make it work in my express views:
// main app
var helpers = require('./util/helpers')
app.helpers({"timeAgo": helpers.timeAgo})
// view code
<span class="created"><%= timeAgo(activity.created) %></span>

// helpers file
/*
* JavaScript Pretty Date
* Copyright (c) 2008 John Resig (jquery.com)
* Licensed under the MIT license.
*
* Small Modification by Jamund Ferguson to accept a real Date object
*/
exports.timeAgo = function(time) {
var date = time instanceof Date ? time : new Date((time || "").replace(/-/g,"/").replace(/[TZ]/g," "))
var diff = (((new Date()).getTime() - date.getTime()) / 1000)
var day_diff = Math.floor(diff / 86400)
if ( isNaN(day_diff) || day_diff < 0 || day_diff >= 31 )
return;
return day_diff == 0 && (
diff < 60 && "just now" ||
diff < 120 && "1 minute ago" ||
diff < 3600 && Math.floor( diff / 60 ) + " minutes ago" ||
diff < 7200 && "1 hour ago" ||
diff < 86400 && Math.floor( diff / 3600 ) + " hours ago") ||
day_diff == 1 && "Yesterday" ||
day_diff < 7 && day_diff + " days ago" ||
day_diff < 31 && Math.ceil( day_diff / 7 ) + " weeks ago";
}
view raw timeAgo.js hosted with ❤ by GitHub