django.contrib.humanize is a set of Django template filters that adds human touch to data. It provides naturalday filter that formats date to ‘yesterday’, ‘today’ or ‘tomorrow’ when applicable.
A similar requirement which the humanize pacakge does not address is to display time difference with this human touch. so here is a snippet that does so.
2 thoughts on “Humanizing the time difference ( in django )”
Hi Anand,
Thanks for sharing naturalTimeDifference(). I made two changes to improve your code, feel free to share with others. First, if the filter is passed a datetime.timedelta object it uses that instead of calculating datetime.now() – value. Second, with one additional conditional it now says “1 hour ago” for (7200 > delta.seconds >= 3600) and “N hours ago” for delta >= 7200. Small changes for a grammatically correct result.
Here is the updated filter code:
def naturalTimeDifference(value):
“””
Finds the difference between the datetime value given and now()
and returns appropriate humanize form
“””
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
if isinstance(value, timedelta):
delta = value
elif isinstance(value, datetime):
delta = datetime.now() – value
else:
delta = None
if delta:
if delta.days > 6:
return value.strftime(“%b %d”) # May 15
if delta.days > 1:
return value.strftime(“%A”) # Wednesday
elif delta.days == 1:
return ‘yesterday’ # yesterday
elif delta.seconds >= 7200:
return str(delta.seconds / 3600 ) + ‘ hours ago’ # 3 hours ago
elif delta.seconds >= 3600:
return ‘1 hour ago’ # 1 hour ago
elif delta.seconds > MOMENT:
return str(delta.seconds/60) + ‘ minutes ago’ # 29 minutes ago
else:
return ‘a moment ago’ # a moment ago
return defaultfilters.date(value)
else:
return str(value)
Hi Anand,
Thanks for sharing naturalTimeDifference(). I made two changes to improve your code, feel free to share with others. First, if the filter is passed a datetime.timedelta object it uses that instead of calculating datetime.now() – value. Second, with one additional conditional it now says “1 hour ago” for (7200 > delta.seconds >= 3600) and “N hours ago” for delta >= 7200. Small changes for a grammatically correct result.
Here is the updated filter code:
def naturalTimeDifference(value):
“””
Finds the difference between the datetime value given and now()
and returns appropriate humanize form
“””
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
if isinstance(value, timedelta):
delta = value
elif isinstance(value, datetime):
delta = datetime.now() – value
else:
delta = None
if delta:
if delta.days > 6:
return value.strftime(“%b %d”) # May 15
if delta.days > 1:
return value.strftime(“%A”) # Wednesday
elif delta.days == 1:
return ‘yesterday’ # yesterday
elif delta.seconds >= 7200:
return str(delta.seconds / 3600 ) + ‘ hours ago’ # 3 hours ago
elif delta.seconds >= 3600:
return ‘1 hour ago’ # 1 hour ago
elif delta.seconds > MOMENT:
return str(delta.seconds/60) + ‘ minutes ago’ # 29 minutes ago
else:
return ‘a moment ago’ # a moment ago
return defaultfilters.date(value)
else:
return str(value)
Hi, now with Django 1.4 and time zone support you need to replace
datetime.utcnow() - valuewith
delta = timezone.now() - value
where ‘timezone’ is imported with
from django.utils import timezone