Humanize Duration with English words shortened.

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.

Installation

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

npm install humanize-duration

Basic usage

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'

fallbacks

Fallback languages if the provided language cannot be found (accepts an ISO 639-1 code from one of the supported languages). It works from left to right.

humanizeDuration(3000, { language: "bad language", fallbacks: ["en"] }); // '3 seconds'
humanizeDuration(3000, {
  language: "bad language",
  fallbacks: ["bad language", "es"],
}); // '3 segundos'

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 months'

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'

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'

maxDecimalPoints

Number that defines a maximal decimal points for float values.

humanizeDuration(8123.456789); // 8.12 seconds
humanizeDuration(8123.456789, { maxDecimalPoints: 3 }); // 8.123 seconds
humanizeDuration(8123.456789, { maxDecimalPoints: 6 }); // 8.123456 seconds
humanizeDuration(8123.45, { maxDecimalPoints: 6 }); // 8.12345 seconds
humanizeDuration(8000, { maxDecimalPoints: 6 }); // 8 seconds

unitMeasures

Customize the value used to calculate each unit of time.

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

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
Afrikaans	`af`
Albanian	`sq`
Arabic	`ar`
Basque	`eu`
Bengali	`bn`
Bulgarian	`bg`
Catalan	`ca`
Chinese, simplified	`zh_CN`
Chinese, traditional	`zh_TW`
Croatian	`hr`
Czech	`cs`
Danish	`da`
Dutch	`nl`
English	`en`
Esperanto	`eo`
Estonian	`et`
Faroese	`fo`
Farsi/Persian	`fa`
Finnish	`fi`
French	`fr`
German	`de`
Greek	`el`
Hebrew	`he`
Hindi	`hi`
Hungarian	`hu`
Icelandic	`is`
Indonesian	`id`
Italian	`it`
Japanese	`ja`
Kannada	`kn`
Khmer	`km`
Korean	`ko`
Kurdish	`ku`
Lao	`lo`
Latvian	`lv`
Lithuanian	`lt`
Macedonian	`mk`
Malay	`ms`
Marathi	`mr`
Norwegian	`no`
Polish	`pl`
Portuguese	`pt`
Romanian	`ro`
Russian	`ru`
Serbian	`sr`
Slovak	`sk`
Slovenian	`sl`
Spanish	`es`
Swahili	`sw`
Swedish	`sv`
Tamil	`ta`
Telugu	`te`
Thai	`th`
Turkish	`tr`
Ukrainian	`uk`
Urdu	`ur`
Vietnamese	`vi`
Welsh	`cy`

For a list of supported languages, you can use the getSupportedLanguages function. The results may not be in the same order every time.

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
Wasuwat Limsuparhat for Thai support
Malikoun for Lao support
Villu Orav for Estonian support
Harijs Deksnis for Latvian support
Nirmala Thapa(Subit) for Faroese support
Fahad Kassim for Swahili support
Prayag Roy Choudhury for updating Mocha
Aryan Rawlani for Hindi support
Kristijan Jesenski for Slovenian support
Michal Karzel for improving Arabic support

Licensed under the permissive Unlicense. Enjoy!

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