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Facebook Style Formatting of Dates (Time Ago)

I was really surprised that I couldn't find an iOS date formatter which implemented the Facebook style "Time Ago" format so I whipped one up myself. I reverse engineered the Facebook format, so this should be pretty accurate. Feel free to use it in your projects / improve it.

Hope you enjoy :)

If you have any questions feel free to contact me here: www.nikilster.com/about.html

Date Format

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< 1 minute = "Just now" < 1 hour = "x minutes ago" Today = "x hours ago" Yesterday = "Yesterday at 1:28pm" < Last 7 days = "Friday at 1:48am" < Last 30 days = "March 30 at 1:14 pm" < 1 year = "September 15" Anything else = "September 9, 2011"

About

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• This NSDate category adds the facebook style "time ago" date formatting.
• This mimics Facebook mobile (the desktop version has slightly different date formatting).
• This assumes all dates are in the past.

To use this in your iOS project:

1. Drag both NSDate+NVTimeAgo.m aand NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h into your iOS project in XCode

2. In the files that you want to use this functionality in,itType:

    #import "NSDate+NVTimeAgo.h" 
   

   somewhere near the top of your file.

3. Use the date formatter on a date by calling:

   [date formattedAsTimeAgo];

   where date is an (NSDate *) and represents a date IN THE PAST (relative to now).

   If you have a mysql datetime string and you want to convert it to the time ago format, do:

   NSString *mysqlDatetime = NSString *timeAgoFormattedDate = [NSDate mysqlDatetimeFormattedAsTimeAgo:mysqlDatetime];

Made By Nikil Viswanathan on 4/18/2013 You can contact me on: www.nikilster.com