Human-oriented representation of time deltas, a Python library.
Showing arrival time Gmail-style
Here's how you would do this with pytimeago
assuming msg is email message object
and msg.time is arriveal timestamp:
from pytimeago.english import english
from time import strftime, time
line = "%s (%s)" % \
(strftime("%b %d", msg.time),
english(time()-msg.time()))
And then pass line to the template.
First, I shall define what time delta is.
Since Δ generally means “difference”,
we take time delta to stand for
difference between two events in time.
Quite common, however, is to have the current time
for the second event. In pytimeago we deal
with time deltas from such a perspective.
Quite possibly, you can make use of this library if your application displays some dynamically generated items to the user, and you are looking for a good way to present information on how long ago specific item was created/processed/whatever.
Below is small code snippet demonstrating
how simple it is to embed pytimeago:
from pytimeago.english import english from time import time message = queue.getNextMessage() delta = time() - message.arrived_time print "Message arrived %s" % english(delta)
Prints, e.g.
Message arrived 15mins ago
As you see, pytimeago is package,
and has individual modules for every language supported.
As of 2006-08-13 the only supported language is English.
However, you can take a look at rather trivial implementation
of English engine, write one for your language, and send
it to to me (email at the bottom of page).
Every language should come with a set of doctests (I prefer them to casual unit tests), just like the English version does. Don't be too verbose, but check essential cases.
pytimeago is licenced under
LGPL.
I'd be happy to hear if you use this in your software.
Note that language module(s) can also be taken standalone to other projects,
if desired.
You can download current version as a tarball.
You can then run doctests for English engine, e.g.
$ python pytimeago/english.py -v ... 22 tests in 2 items. 22 passed and 0 failed. Test passed.
Note: be sure to put pytimeago on your
include path, either by copying pytimeago directory
to one of directories in sys.path, or manually
adding the right directory to that list.