datetime - Natural/Relative days in Python

Question

I'd like a way to show natural times for dated items in Python. Similar to how Twitter will show a message from "a moment ago", "a few minutes ago", "two hours ago", "three days ago", etc.

Django 1.0 has a "humanize" method in django.contrib. I'm not using the Django framework, and even if I were, it's more limited than what I'd like.

Please let me (and generations of future searchers) know if there is a good working solution already. Since this is a common enough task, I imagine there must be something.

Answer 1

Twitter dates in specific are interesting because they are relative only for the first day. After 24 hours they just show the month and day. After a year they start showing the last two digits of the year. Here's a sample function that does something more akin to Twitter relative dates, though it always shows the year too after 24 hours. It's US locale only, but you can always alter it as needed.

# tested in Python 2.7
import datetime
def prettydate(d):
    diff = datetime.datetime.utcnow() - d
    s = diff.seconds
    if diff.days > 7 or diff.days < 0:
        return d.strftime('%d %b %y')
    elif diff.days == 1:
        return '1 day ago'
    elif diff.days > 1:
        return '{} days ago'.format(diff.days)
    elif s <= 1:
        return 'just now'
    elif s < 60:
        return '{} seconds ago'.format(s)
    elif s < 120:
        return '1 minute ago'
    elif s < 3600:
        return '{} minutes ago'.format(s/60)
    elif s < 7200:
        return '1 hour ago'
    else:
        return '{} hours ago'.format(s/3600)