humanTime

Convert timestamps to natural language: "2025-04-08 07:13:27" becomes "yesterday" or "2 hours ago" based on the current time (e.g., April 9, 2025).

humanTime is a zero-dependency module for browsers and servers (Node.js, Bun, Deno) that formats dates and times into human-readable strings. It expresses time as:

• Seconds if under 1 minute (e.g., "30 seconds ago"),
• Minutes if under 1 hour (e.g., "45 minutes ago"),
• Hours if under 24 hours (e.g., "2 hours ago"),
• Days if within the same year (e.g., "3 days ago" or "tomorrow"),
• A localized absolute date if in a different year (e.g., "April 9, 2024" or "9 avril 2024").

Customize the output with an options object. For internationalization (i18n), it defaults to the environment’s locale—browser language in the client or system locale on the server.

Installation & Usage

npm install humantime

import humanTime from 'humantime';

// Use a string
const formattedDateStr = humanTime('2025-04-09T10:11:47.232Z');

// Or a Date object
const formattedDateObj = humanTime(new Date());

// Customize with options
const formattedFrench = humanTime(new Date(), {
  locale: 'fr-FR',
  disableRelative: true, // "9 avril 2025" instead of "5 minutes ago"
  month: 'numeric'      // "09/04/2025" instead of "9 avril 2025"
});

The Options Object

• locale: Defaults to the environment’s locale with Latin numbers (default-u-nu-latn). Accepts any ISO language code or Locales from the Intl API.
• year, month, day: Set display format per DateTimeFormat options (e.g., 'numeric', 'long').
• hour, minute, second: Add time details (e.g., 'numeric' for "14:30").
• forceYear (bool): Include the year even if it’s the current year (e.g., "April 9, 2025" vs. "April 9").
• forceTime (bool): Show time in absolute mode (e.g., "April 9, 2025, 2:40 PM").
• disableRelative (bool): Use absolute dates only (e.g., "April 9, 2025" vs. "2 days ago").

For forceTime, hours and minutes appear by default. To include seconds, specify it:

humanTime(timestamp, { forceTime: true, second: 'numeric' });

That’s all you need!

Under the Hood

humanTime uses the native Intl API, including Intl.RelativeTimeFormat, for natural, locale-aware formatting. This keeps it lightweight (<1kB gzipped) without needing built-in translation or formatting rules.

Intl support is robust, so no polyfills are required for modern browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge).

Go to bed smarter than you woke up

You might not know it, but the ISO codes we use to specify locales (country and optionally region) derive from another standard: the UN M49. Under the UN Standard Country or Area Codes, the world is divided into Area and Subregions, each having its own 3-digit code.

As the unicode library has a complete support for both ISO and UN notations, you can refer to locales as any of them fr-250 being equal to fr-FR.

Now what's cool is that since around 2017, world zones have been added: Europe and World. This means that you can refer to a generic english when it makes sense!

en-001 is english world, or international english if you will. This would format a datetime like this: "18 October 2022 at 2:40 am" instead of the North American "October 18, 2022 at 2:40 AM".

The European english, en-150 would slightly differ in the time handling, going for the 24h format: "18 October 2022 at 02:40".

As for currencies (even if unrelated with humanTime) international english will be more precise with the currency at hand: "US$99.90" for both en-001 and en-150 whereas en (or en-US obviously) would display "$99.90". The latter can be confusing for an international audience that has no idea if we're talking USD, CAD, AUD or whatnot.

As it has full support in glibc, it's in all operating systems and browers: Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, you name it! Worse case scenario, on very old systems that wouldn't support it, it would fallback to the broader 2-letter code: "en" in our case.

Contributing

Room for improvement? Hack away and submit PRs! Use ESLint for linting & formatting, and you’re set 👍.