Get pass date && time from TIMESTAMP field using PHP

Question

I have a field in a DB called created_at and store data in this format:

1980-11-28 04:05:25

So I want to get how many time has been passed since that date as for example: 3 seconds || 5 minutes || 22 hours || 1 days || 6 weeks || 1 month || 3 years (notice the || so can be any of this options not all of them). I don't know if I can get this directly from a query meaning using SQL language and I check this [1] but can't find the right function to do this. So I think to get it using PHP but either don't know how to. Can any help me?

[1] http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/date-and-time-functions.html

Answer 1

I'm unsure if there is a native PHP function that allows you to do this, however you can make one. I found this one at http://css-tricks.com/snippets/php/time-ago-function/ and edited it to make it a bit more functional. Using this we can just simply put your created_at string through it and get the result.

// The function to get the final string
function timeago($tm,$lim=0) {
   $cur_tm = time(); $dif = $cur_tm-$tm;
   $pds = array('second','minute','hour','day','week','month','year','decade');
   $lngh = array(1,60,3600,86400,604800,2630880,31570560,315705600);
   for($v = sizeof($lngh)-1; ($v >= 0)&&(($no = $dif/$lngh[$v])<=1); $v--); if($v < 0) $v = 0; $_tm = $cur_tm-($dif%$lngh[$v]);
   $no = floor($no); if($no <> 1) $pds[$v] .='s'; $x=sprintf("%d %s",$no,$pds[$v]);
   if($lim>1 && ($v >= 1)&&(($cur_tm-$_tm) > 0)) $x .= ', ' . timeago($_tm,$lim-1); else $x .= ' ago';
   return $x;
}

// Run the MySQL query to get the string
$query = mysql_query("SELECT `created_at` FROM `table` LIMIT 1");
// Put the string into a PHP variable
$created_at = mysql_result($query,0);

// Show the results
echo timeago($created_at);
// This will output something like  '4 years ago' or '12 seconds ago'

// You can fine tune how accurate you want the function to make your 'time ago' string to be by adding a number as the second variable for the function
// For example:
echo timeago($created_at, 6);
// This will output something like '4 decades, 2 years, 7 months, 1 week, 15 hours, 49 minutes, 12 seconds ago'