Timespan Smarty Modifier

Smarty modifier intended to convert given date in Smarty template into human-readable string such as 2 minutes ago in many languages. Currently only english and polish languages are supported.

Polish numeral inflection is well known for its variety. It has 3 numeral inflection forms. This library tries to cope with this task.

Features

• just now when time interval is <= 10 default seconds
• about a half minute ago when within 30 seconds +/- 10% default tolerance
• about a minute ago when near full minute (default -10% tolerance)
• a minute ago when at least 60 seconds and less than 90 seconds - 10% tolerance
• about a minute and a half ago when 90 seconds +/- 10% tolerance
• 2 minutes ago
• about 2 and half minutes ago when 120 seconds + (30 +/- 10% tolerance)
• an hour and 25 minutes ago picks two greatest units and concatenates them
• 2 hours and 5 minutes ago

Notice that about shows up when some time is approximated.

ago can be turned off.

There is also a special polish expression for 1.5 unit called półtora/półtorej. These special cases are also included in library.

Requirements

Modifier is being written on Smarty 3.1.8, so I can't guarantee it will work on version < 3.0. You also need at least PHP 5.3 since library uses namespaces. No external libraries needed. If You want to run unit tests, PHPUnit 3.6 is needed.

Installation

All You need to do to use modifier is to put modifier.timespan.php into Your Smarty plugin folder. For the sake of readability, modifier file has been thrown into separate plugin folder instead of Smarty's Smarty/libs/plugins one. If You want to do that as well, use $smarty->addPluginsDir('yourpluginsfolder'); in Your Smarty configuration section.

Library also needs to be registered for autoload. It uses standard SplClassLoader, for example:

<?php
require_once 'SplClassLoader.php';
$classLoader = new SplClassLoader('Spiechu\TimeSpan' , 'library');
$classLoader->register();

Usage

In Your PHP script assign DateTime object or timestamp integer for example like:

<?php
$smarty->assign('date', new DateTime('1 second ago'));
// or
$smarty->assign('date', time() - 1);

and then in template:

{$date|timespan}

output will be:

just now

You can modify language and suffix 'ago' displaying for example:

{$date|timespan:'PL'}
{$date|timespan:'EN':false}

You can also use library without Smarty:

<?php
$timeSpan = new TimeSpan();
$timeSpan
         ->setStartDate($startDateTime) // DateTime or timestamp
         ->setLanguage($lang) // 'EN' or 'PL'
         ->showSuffix($suffix); // true or false
return $timeSpan->getTimeSpanString();

If there is only one certain unit, numeric value is omitted. For example a minute ago, an hour ago...