Fuzzy Dates in PHP

rob 24 Mar 2010

Ever need to provide a fuzzy date using PHP for your web app? Heres a simple snippet that will do just that.

<?php function fuzzy_date($timestamp) { $myDays = array("Sun", "Mon", "Tues", "Wed", "Thurs", "Fri", "Sat"); if( preg_match("/[-\/:]/", $timestamp) ) $timestamp = strtotime($timestamp); if($timestamp > time()) // All future dates return date('m/d/y', $timestamp); elseif($timestamp >= mktime(0,0,0)) // Today return 'Today'; elseif($timestamp >= mktime(0,0,0) - 86400) // Yesterday return 'Yesterday'; elseif($timestamp >= mktime(0,0,0) - 86400*7) // Within 7 days return $myDays[date('w', $timestamp)]; elseif($timestamp >= mktime(0,0,0,1,1)) // Within 1 year return date('M d', $timestamp); else // Older than 1 year return date('m/d/y', $timestamp); } // Run it for the past month foreach(range(0,31) as $day) printf("%s<br/>", fuzzy_date(time() - ($day * 86400))); ?>

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Rob Hurring is a software engineer residing in the NJ tri-state area. He spends most of his time writing Ruby code or hacking on whatever he finds neat.

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Fuzzy Dates in PHP

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