Feature: add option for keeping zeros in the output

[Nuno Santos]

Sometimes it may make sense having the output with the same length by keeping zeros.

Eg. 21h 06m 00s instead of 21h 6m

[Evan Hahn]

What do you think the API should look like?

[Nuno Santos]

I guess just an option like {leading_zeros: True}

[Evan Hahn]

It seems like the option might need to be numeric, like { leadingZeros: 2 } so that the library knows how many leading zeros to insert. Do you agree?

[Nuno Santos]

I'm afraid I don't :-)

There are only 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour and 24hours in a day. I don't see a case where you would ever want more than two digits. Maybe calling it leading_zeros is misleading?

My idea was for eg. 1h becoming 01h 00m 00s.

[Evan Hahn]

It might make a little more sense for things like years or milliseconds, where the number of leading zeros isn't necessarily constant. There are some other examples, too, like if you want to humanize the whole string in hours only.

What do you think?

[Nuno Santos]

I think that can increase complexity quite a bit, for little gains. You could also argue that you might want a different number of digits for different units (2 digits for seconds, 3 for milliseconds), so now you'd need to declare more than one number.

I think that keeping it simple and restricting it to a reasonable scenario of 2 digits for hours/minutes/seconds and 3 for milliseconds would cover most cases. Years are not divisible so I don't think it makes sense to worry about them.

Just my personal opinion of course :)

[Evan Hahn]

What about something more flexible? Perhaps something that'd return each unit with its number and you could build this functionality yourself?

[John]

I'm listing a bunch of humanized times and would love a feature like this in order to keep the columns nice and tidy.

Maybe a new config option that works similarly to the language/word configuration for creating a language

For instance, I'd create a custom humanizer that could be configured like this:

humanizeDuration.humanizer({
  numberRendering: {
    y: x => x,
    mo: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    w: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    d: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    h: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    m: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    s: x => pad(x, 2, '0'),
    ms: x => pad(x, 3, '0'),
  },

The defaults would just return the original

[Evan Hahn]

This library is in maintenance mode, so I won't be adding new features, sadly. I'm going to close this issue. See #120 for more.

[Nuno Santos]

@EvanHahn sorry to hear that, but thanks for your work 🍻