Gmail Style Date Formatting In Python

I can format date with strftime in python, but now I want to show date in format relative to current time. i.e. if date is near today, show in time. if it is within week, show as

Solution 1:

There is a library

From the documentation,

[python]
>>> from relativeDates import *
>>> import time
>>> x = time.time()-1000
>>> getRelativeTime(x)
'17 minutes ago'
>>> x-=12345
>>> getRelativeTime(x)
'3 hours ago'
>>> x+=543211
>>> getRelativeTime(x)
'in 6 days'
>>> getRelativeTime(x,accuracy=2)
'in 6 days 3 hours'
>>> x-=987661
>>> getRelativeTime(x,accuracy=2)
'5 days 7 hours ago'
>>> getRelativeTime(x,accuracy=2,alternative_past="long long ago")
'long long ago'
>>> getRelativeTimeStr("07/15/06 1823")
'in 4 days'
>>> getRelativeTimeStr("07/10/06 1823")
'7 hours ago'
>>> getRelativeTimeStr("07/10/06 1823",accuracy=2)
'7 hours 30 mins ago'
[/python]

Solution 2:

django.contrib.humanize.naturaltime

For datetime values, returns a string representing how many seconds, minutes or hours ago it was – falling back to a longer date format if the value is more than a day old. In case the datetime value is in the future the return value will automatically use an appropriate phrase.

Examples (when ‘now’ is 17 Feb 2007 16:30:00):

17 Feb 2007 16:30:00 becomes now.
17 Feb 2007 16:29:31 becomes 29 seconds ago.
17 Feb 2007 16:29:00 becomes a minute ago.
17 Feb 2007 16:25:35 becomes 4 minutes ago.
17 Feb 2007 15:30:29 becomes an hour ago.
17 Feb 2007 13:31:29 becomes 2 hours ago.
16 Feb 2007 13:31:29 becomes 1 day ago.
17 Feb 2007 16:30:30 becomes 29 seconds from now.
17 Feb 2007 16:31:00 becomes a minute from now.
17 Feb 2007 16:34:35 becomes 4 minutes from now.
17 Feb 2007 16:30:29 becomes an hour from now.
17 Feb 2007 18:31:29 becomes 2 hours from now.
18 Feb 2007 16:31:29 becomes 1 day from now.

You can get the sources here.