Comments on: Smart dates in CL

By: mango

mango — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:44:53 +0000

Why do you nest the base-bind 3 times? Seems like you only use the diff-* variables in the body.

PS: wordpress uses horizontal space really well (NOT!)

By: Leslie

Leslie — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 08:20:39 +0000

http://www.google.com/search?q=alan+crowe+base-bind

Unfortunately Alan hasn’t provided documentation for BASE-BIND, either.

But it’s not very hard to figure out from the name and the usage in the code.

You’re right of course that it doesn’t end up numerically optimal. How about posting a version with that flaw fixed? :)

By: evrim

evrim — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 22:48:55 +0000

floor’ing thrice? um, what about subtracting first then flooring?

btw, greetz in your blog is not something i would expect to see. i would like to see the documentation of that macro. it’s hard to figure out what your syntactic sugars do.

By: Leslie

Leslie — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:14:57 +0000

Looks good! Too bad it’s in Java…

By: pgd

pgd — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 20:07:13 +0000

Well, a Java solution must be presented, also; Joda-time: http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/

By: Leslie

Leslie — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:10:37 +0000

Yeah, you know I prefer CL, but… lovely! :)

By: Brian

Brian — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 23:33:46 +0000

I tried to duplicate your CL algorithm because I thought it was clever.

#!/usr/bin/ruby
 
class Time
  def smart_date
    base_bind(Time.now - self, 60, 60, 24) do |sec, min, hour, day|
      if day &gt; 6
        to_s
      elsif day &gt; 1
        strftime '%A'
      elsif day == 1
        'Yesterday'
      elsif hour &gt; 0
        "%dh%dm ago" % [hour, min]
      elsif min &gt; 0
        "%dm%ds ago" % [min, sec]
      else
        "%d seconds ago" % sec
      end
    end
  end
 
  private
  def base_bind(amount, *radices)
    if radices.empty?
      yield amount
    else
      radix = radices.shift
      quotient, remainder = amount.divmod(radix)
      base_bind(quotient, *radices) do |*args|
        yield *args.unshift(remainder)
      end
    end
  end
end
 
 
[36, 90, 120, 130, 3599, 3600, 3601, 86400, 86500, 173000, 14290010].each do |offset|
  puts "%d: %s" % [offset, (Time.now - offset).smart_date]
end

By: Ben Zimmerman

Ben Zimmerman — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 05:41:52 +0000

Here is my python version. A few pieces such as the date format strings were borrowed from Michael Klier’s version.

from datetime import datetime, timedelta
 
MINUTE = 60
HOUR = 60 * 60
DAY = 60 * 60 * 24
 
def smart_date(now, offset):
    if offset &lt; MINUTE:
        return '%s seconds ago' % offset
    if offset &lt; HOUR:
        return '%sm%ss ago' % (offset // MINUTE, offset % MINUTE)
    if offset &lt; DAY:
        return '%sh%sm ago' % (offset // HOUR, (offset % HOUR) // MINUTE)
    if offset &lt; (DAY * 2):
        return 'Yesterday'
    old_date = (now - timedelta(seconds=offset))
    if offset &lt; (DAY * 7):
        return old_date.strftime('%A')
    return old_date.strftime('%A, %Y %B %m, %H:%I')
 
if __name__ == '__main__':
    now = datetime.utcnow()
    for offset in [36, 90, 120, 130, 3599, 3600, 3601, 86400, 86500, 173000, 14290010]:
        print "%d: %s" % (offset, smart_date(now, offset))
# ouput
36: 36 seconds ago
90: 1m30s ago
120: 2m0s ago
130: 2m10s ago
3599: 59m59s ago
3600: 1h0m ago
3601: 1h0m ago
86400: Yesterday
86500: Yesterday
173000: Thursday
14290010: Monday, 2008 January 01, 20:08

By: Michael Klier

Michael Klier — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:37:06 +0000

Aha thanks for the info :-).

I really like posts like this one, solving these little problems is always fun, so keep ‘em coming!

P.S.: Btw, it seems all “>” in my comment were converted to “>” (and I just noticed that the variable “base” in the function is obsolete, a leftover from previous attempts).

By: Leslie

Leslie — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:04:28 +0000

Thanks for the Python version! :)

Use

to mark code blocks, where LANG is a valid GeSHi language identifier.

I’ll probably install a comment preview plugin.

Don’t worry, editing comments isn’t such a huge chore. I don’t have to reindent stuff.