DateFmt

DateFmt is an easy-to-use (mostly one method) locale-aware date formatting class supporting national date/time formats and relative time (like "1 day ago"). It focuses on easy-to-remember format strings (hello, date() and strftime()).

[ Full syntax & API ]

Updated 16 February 2014: fixed a number of bugs in AGO[], added some comments and reformatted the code. It's also possible to call PascalCase() methods as if they were camelCase() thanks to magic __call(). Upgrade is fully backward-compatible, therefore highly recommended for everyone.

Features:

Basic formatting: d# (day), d## (zero-padded), D_ ("Mon"), D__ ("Monday"), etc.
Relative time: AGO[*] = 1 minute, 2 days ago, etc.
Relative-exact: AGO[d.h] = 1 day 3 hours ago
Relative-short: AGO-SHORT[d.h] = 1d 3h ago
Relative if close to now, otherwise full: AGO[t]IF-FAR[d##my] - outputs "3 hours ago" or if the timestamp is past last 24 hours outputs full time string ("03/23/2012")
Suppressed "ago/after": AGO[*]_ = 1 day 3 hours

Natural language features:

Fractions (e.g. 0.45 hour ago) get translated into "half an hour ago"
Indication of time using "at": [d#.m#.y##]AT h#:m## - outputs "23.3.2012 at 13:23" in English or "23.3.2012 в 13:23" in Russian. Note that no change was required in the format string if spite of the different language
Genetive form (not used in English): Posted on AT[D__] = Posted on Wednesday = Добавлено в среду - compare with Posted on D__ where it would be "Добавлено в среда" (not the correct word form)

Usage

$your_timestamp = 158399691;                // => Wednesday, 08/01/1975
$formatted = DateFmt::Format('D__, d##my', $your_timestamp, 'ru');
// You could also call DateFmt::format().

The first argument is the format string, the second - timestamp (time() if omitted), the third - language (en if omitted).

Installation

Composer

Available under proger/datefmt at Packagist.

Laravel 3

As usual, use the Artisan:

php artisan bundle:install datefmt

Then put this into your application/bundles.php:

'datefmt' => array(
  'autoloads' => array(
    'map' => array('DateFmt' => '(:bundle)/datefmt.php')
  )
)

Now whenever you refer to DateFmt in your code its class will be autoloaded.

Limitations

Nested rules are unsupported: [...]?|AGO[s-d]IF-FAR[[d#my]AT h#m]
Multiple IF's are unsupported: AGO[d]IF>7[..]IF>21[..]IF>...
Empty IF's are not allowed: AGO[h] AGO[h]IF>0[]IF>3[ (AGO[d]_)] (this would create 11 hours ago and 74 hours ago (2 days))

ProgerXP / DateFmt