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Turning a date into a time interval

/ Published in: ActionScript 3
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ActionScript function for turning a date into a time interval

While working on a small Twitter utility, I wrote a function to turn a date into a time interval string. For instance, rather than formatting the date, it returns strings like "Just posted," "6 minutes ago," "4 hours ago," or "20 days ago". It's not a complex function, but I thought I'd post it here in case it might save someone a few minutes of coding. The less time we spend writing code someone else has already written, the more time we can spend innovating.

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  1. private function formatDate(d:Date):String
  2. {
  3. 	var now:Date = new Date();
  4. 	var diff:Number = (now.time - d.time) / 1000; // convert to seconds
  5. 	if (diff < 60) // just posted
  6. 	{
  7. 		return "Just posted";
  8. 	}
  9. 	else if (diff < 3600) // n minutes ago
  10. 	{
  11. 		return (Math.round(diff / 60) + " minutes ago");
  12. 	}
  13. 	else if (diff < 86400) // n hours ago
  14. 	{
  15. 		return (Math.round(diff / 3600) + " hours ago");
  16. 	}
  17. 	else // n days ago
  18. 	{
  19. 		return (Math.round(diff / 86400) + " days ago");
  20. 	}
  21. }

URL: http://weblogs.macromedia.com/cantrell/archives/2009/06/actionscript_fu.html

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