@alexisab/humanize-duration

Humanize Duration

I have the time in milliseconds and I want it to become "30 minutes" or "3 days, 1 hour". Enter Humanize Duration!

This library is actively maintained but no new features will be added.

Basic usage

This package is available as humanize-duration on npm and Bower. You can also include the JavaScript file in the browser.

With require (like in Node or with common build systems):

const humanizeDuration = require('humanize-duration')
humanizeDuration(12000) // '12 seconds'

With a <script> tag:

<script src="humanize-duration.js"></script>
<script>
humanizeDuration(12000)
</script>

Usage

By default, Humanize Duration will humanize down to the second, and will return a decimal for the smallest unit. It will humanize in English by default.

humanizeDuration(3000)      // '3 seconds'
humanizeDuration(2250)      // '2.25 seconds'
humanizeDuration(97320000)  // '1 day, 3 hours, 2 minutes'

Options

You can change the settings by passing options as the second argument:

language

Language for unit display (accepts an ISO 639-1 code from one of the supported languages).

humanizeDuration(3000, { language: 'es' })  // '3 segundos'
humanizeDuration(5000, { language: 'ko' })  // '5 초'

delimiter

String to display between the previous unit and the next value.

humanizeDuration(22140000, { delimiter: ' and ' })  // '6 hours and 9 minutes'
humanizeDuration(22140000, { delimiter: '--' })     // '6 hours--9 minutes'

spacer

String to display between each value and unit.

humanizeDuration(260040000, { spacer: ' whole ' })  // '3 whole days, 14 whole minutes'
humanizeDuration(260040000, { spacer: '' })         // '3days, 14minutes'

largest

Number representing the maximum number of units to display for the duration.

humanizeDuration(1000000000000)                  // '31 years, 8 months, 1 week, 19 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds'
humanizeDuration(1000000000000, { largest: 2 })  // '31 years, 8 month'

units

Array of strings to define which units are used to display the duration (if needed). Can be one, or a combination of any, of the following: ['y', 'mo', 'w', 'd', 'h', 'm', 's', 'ms']

humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ['h'] })       // '1 hour'
humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ['m'] })       // '60 minutes'
humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ['d', 'h'] })  // '1 hour'

round

Boolean value. Use true to round the smallest unit displayed (can be combined with largest and units).

humanizeDuration(1200)                   // '1.2 seconds'
humanizeDuration(1200, { round: true })  // '1 second'
humanizeDuration(1600, { round: true })  // '2 seconds'

padUnits

Number representing the final size of the digits (enlarged with 0).

humanizeDuration(0)                          // '0 seconds'
humanizeDuration(1000, { padUnits: 2 })      // '01 second'
humanizeDuration(10000, { padUnits: 2 })     // '10 seconds'
humanizeDuration(301000, { padUnits: 2 })    // '05 minutes, 01 second'
humanizeDuration(601000, { padUnits: 2 })    // '10 minutes, 01 second'

humanizeDuration(1000, { padUnits: 3 })      // '000 seconds'

decimal

String to substitute for the decimal point in a decimal fraction.

humanizeDuration(1200)                          // '1.2 seconds'
humanizeDuration(1200, { decimal: ' point ' })  // '1 point 2 seconds'

conjunction

String to include before the final unit. You can also set serialComma to false to eliminate the final comma.

humanizeDuration(22140000, { conjunction: ' and ' })                      // '6 hours and 9 minutes'
humanizeDuration(22141000, { conjunction: ' and ' })                      // '6 hours, 9 minutes, and 1 second'
humanizeDuration(22140000, { conjunction: ' and ', serialComma: false })  // '6 hours and 9 minutes'
humanizeDuration(22141000, { conjunction: ' and ', serialComma: false })  // '6 hours, 9 minutes and 1 second'

unitMeasures

Customize the value used to calculate each unit of time.

humanizeDuration(400)    // '0.4 seconds'
humanizeDuration(400, {  // '1 year, 1 month, 5 days'
  unitMeasures: {
    y: 365,
    mo: 30,
    w: 7,
    d: 1
  }
})

Combined example

humanizeDuration(3602000, {
  language: 'es',
  round: true,
  spacer: ' glorioso ',
  units: ['m']
}) // '60 glorioso minutos'

Humanizers

If you find yourself setting same options over and over again, you can create a humanizer that changes the defaults, which you can still override later.

const spanishHumanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer({
  language: 'es',
  units: ['y', 'mo', 'd']
})

spanishHumanizer(71177400000)  // '2 años, 3 meses, 2 días'
spanishHumanizer(71177400000, { units: ['d', 'h'] })  // '823 días, 19.5 horas'

You can also add new languages to humanizers. For example:

const shortEnglishHumanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer({
  language: 'shortEn',
  languages: {
    shortEn: {
      y: () => 'y',
      mo: () => 'mo',
      w: () => 'w',
      d: () => 'd',
      h: () => 'h',
      m: () => 'm',
      s: () => 's',
      ms: () => 'ms',
    }
  }
})

shortEnglishHumanizer(15600000)  // '4 h, 20 m'

You can also add languages after initializing:

const humanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer()

humanizer.languages.shortEn = {
  y: () => 'y',
  // ...

Internally, the main humanizeDuration function is just a wrapper around a humanizer.

Supported languages

Humanize Duration supports the following languages:

Language	Code
Arabic	ar
Bulgarian	bg
Catalan	ca
Chinese, simplified	zh_CN
Chinese, traditional	zh_TW
Croatian	hr
Czech	cs
Danish	da
Dutch	nl
English	en
Farsi/Persian	fa
Finnish	fi
French	fr
German	de
Greek	gr
Hungarian	hu
Icelandic	is
Indonesian	id
Italian	it
Japanese	ja
Korean	ko
Lao	lo
Lithuanian	lt
Malay	ms
Norwegian	no
Polish	pl
Portuguese	pt
Russian	ru
Slovak	sk
Spanish	es
Swedish	sv
Turkish	tr
Ukrainian	uk
Urdu	ur
Vietnamese	vi

For a list of supported languages, you can use the getSupportedLanguages function.

humanizeDuration.getSupportedLanguages()
// ['ar', 'bg', 'ca', 'cs', da', 'de', ...]

This function won't return any new languages you define; it will only return the defaults supported by the library.

Credits

Lovingly made by Evan Hahn with help from:

• Martin Prins for language support
• Filipi Siqueira for Portuguese support
• Peter Rekdal Sunde for Norwegian support
• Michał Janiec for Polish support
• Eileen Li for Chinese support
• Tommy Brunn for Swedish support
• Giovanni Pellerano for Italian support
• Rahma Sghaier for Arabic support
• Evgenios Kastanias for Greek support
• Oleksii Mylotskyi for Ukrainian support
• Patrik Simek for Czech support
• Toni Helminen for Finnish support
• Vidmantas Drasutis for Lithuanian support
• Manh Tuan for Vietnamese support
• Leonard Lee for Indonesian & Malay support
• Jesse Jackson for documentation help
• Óli Tómas Freysson for Icelandic support
• Saeed Ganji for Farsi/Persian support
• Caner Elci for Bulgarian support
• Matej Kolesár for Slovak support
• Abdul Jalil for Urdu support
• Alexis Ablain for the addition of the leadingZeros option
• Malikoun for Lao support

Licensed under the permissive Unlicense. Enjoy!

Related modules

• pretty-ms
• angularjs-humanize-duration
• millisec
• HumanizeDuration.ts, a TypeScript version of this module
• aurelia-time