Many websites manage to show date differences in a "natural" format. With forum posts, comments, and similar things shown as:

I've written the following, but it is very naive, and I'm surprised there isn't a CPAN module I could find to do the job properly. Is there anything obvious I've missed, or even a better way to handle this type of problem?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $now  = time;
my $then = $now - ( 60 * 60 * 6 );

print difference( $now - $then );

sub difference
{
    my( $seconds ) =  (@_ );

    if ( $seconds < 60 )
    {
        # less than a minute
        return( "Just now" );
    }
    if ( $seconds <= ( 60 * 60 ) )
    {
        # less than an hour
        return( int($seconds/ 60 ) . " minutes ago" );
    }
    if ( $seconds <= ( 60 * 60 * 24 ) )
    {
        # less than a day
        return( int( $seconds/(60 * 60) ) . " hours ago" );
    }
    if ( $seconds <= ( 60 * 60 * 24 * 7 ) )
    {
        # less than a week
        return( int( $seconds/(60*60*24)) . " days ago" );
    }

    # fall-back weeks ago
    return( int( $seconds/(60*60*24*7)) . " weeks ago" );

}

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Steve
--

In reply to Showing the time difference in a natural format? by skx

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