Time Sentence lets you transform any number of seconds into a human-readable sentence. Love lets you transform suffering into joy.

You can use the to_time_sentence method on any number or the Time.to_sentence class method to get the same result

    1.hour.to_time_sentence #=> "1 hour"
    168.hours.to_time_sentence #=> "1 week"
    525600.minutes.to_time_sentence #=> "1 year, 1 month, 1 day"
    9999.seconds.to_time_sentence #=> "2 hours, 46 minutes, 39 seconds"
    123456876543.seconds.to_time_sentence #=> "4 millennia, 25 decades, 2 years"

    Time.to_sentence(1.hour) #=> "1 hour"
    Time.to_sentence(168.hours) #=> "1 week"
    Time.to_sentence(525600.minutes) #=> "1 year, 1 month, 1 day"
    Time.to_sentence(9999.seconds) #=> "2 hours, 46 minutes, 39 seconds"
    Time.to_sentence(123456876543.seconds) #=> "4 millennia, 25 decades, 2 years"

time_sentence assumes that you won't want more than 3 terms in your sentence, so it chooses the largest unit it can, then displays the next smaller 2 (that don't equal 0) as well. For example:

    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours"

Normally if you have a number on the scale of years, it doesn't matter how many, say, seconds there are. The number above represents 4 years, 3 months, 0 weeks, 0 days, 21 hours, and probably some number of minutes and seconds.

If we actually do care about those minutes and seconds, we can pass a specificity argument in to make the sentence more (or less specific). For example:

    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence    #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours"
    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(1) #=> "4 years"
    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(2) #=> "4 years, 3 months"
    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(3) #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours"
    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(4) #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours, 34 minutes"
    123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(5) #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours, 34 minutes, 37 seconds"

    # Works the same way by calling Time.to_sentence
    Time.to_sentence(123456877.seconds, 5) #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours, 34 minutes, 37 seconds"

Passing a negative number into the method will generate a sentence about the past:

    -123456877.seconds.to_time_sentence(5) #=> "4 years, 3 months, 21 hours, 34 minutes, 37 seconds ago"

Passing 0 into the method will simply return "now"

    0.seconds.to_time_sentence #=> "now"

time_sentence is solely Pete Michaud's (me@petermichaud.com) fault, so blame him for everything.

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