Tutorial: Facebook Style time stamp using PHP

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This function returns the difference between two dates in a human friendly string format. For instance, the values returned are seconds ago, 50 minutes ago, 7 hours ago, a day ago, weeks ago, years ago, and so on. It’s similar to the approach used by many social media websites.

Syntax $time = strtotime(YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS) Example:

$time = strtotime(''2010/09/10 10:00:00'') => "- 3 days ago"

//The default time units are:

$tokens = array ( 31536000 => ''year'', 2592000 => ''month'', 604800 => ''week'', 86400 => ''day'', 3600 => ''hour'', 60 => ''minute'', 1 => ''second'' ); 

//The text will be automatically de-pluralized if, say there is only 1 year.

foreach ($tokens as $unit => $text) {
if ($time < $unit) continue; $numberOfUnits = floor($time / $unit);
return $numberOfUnits.'' ''.$text.(($numberOfUnits>1)?''s'':'''');
}


The complete project can be download from my Github Repository