Luxon for Human-Friendly Durations

TODO: collapasable, copyable, download, etc

User luxon replaced some other time libraries. In modern JS eco system, wha tis a good library to do moment.js stuff like getting the human friendly way to display 864000 seconds?In the modern JavaScript ecosystem, Luxon has indeed become a popular choice for handling dates and times, often being recommended as a replacement for older libraries like Moment.js. Luxon is designed to be more lightweight and offers a range of features that make working with dates and times easier, including formatting dates in a human-friendly way.

To display a duration (such as 864000 seconds) in a human-friendly format with Luxon, you can use Luxon's Duration object. Here's a brief example of how you might accomplish this:

1. First, you need to install Luxon if you haven't already. You can do this using npm or yarn:

   npm install luxon
   

   or

   yarn add luxon
   

2. Then, you can use Luxon's Duration to format the seconds in a human-friendly way. Here's how you could do it:

import { Duration } from 'luxon';

// Assuming you have 864000 seconds
const seconds = 864000;

// Create a Duration object from seconds
const duration = Duration.fromObject({ seconds });

// To get a human-friendly string, we can use toFormat method with a suitable format
// For example, to display it as days, hours, minutes, and seconds
const humanFriendlyDuration = duration.toFormat("d 'days' h 'hours' m 'minutes' s 'seconds'");

console.log(humanFriendlyDuration);

This code will convert the duration from seconds into a more readable format, like "10 days 0 hours 0 minutes 0 seconds" for 864000 seconds. Luxon is very flexible, and you can adjust the format string in the toFormat method to suit your needs, making it easier to display durations in a way that's intuitive for your application's users.

Luxon provides comprehensive documentation that can help you explore further formatting options and other features related to handling dates and times.I want it to automatically decide the formatHow does Luxon know the value seconds is in seconds?Luxon knows the value is in seconds because when you create a Duration object using Duration.fromObject(), you specify the units of the values you're passing in. By using { seconds: value }, you're explicitly telling Luxon that the duration you're creating is measured in seconds. Luxon's API allows you to specify various time units such as years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds, and even milliseconds in this way, which gives you the flexibility to construct durations from any combination of time units.

For automatically deciding the format based on the duration value, Luxon doesn't directly provide a built-in method to automatically format a duration in the most human-friendly way (e.g., choosing whether to show seconds, minutes, days, etc., based on the length of the duration). However, you can achieve this by creating a custom function that examines the duration and decides on an appropriate format. The logic can be as simple or complex as you like, depending on how you want to display the duration.

Here's a basic example of how you could implement such a function:

import { Duration } from 'luxon';

function formatDuration(duration) {
  if (duration.as('days') >= 1) {
    return duration.toFormat("d 'days'");
  } else if (duration.as('hours') >= 1) {
    return duration.toFormat("h 'hours' m 'minutes'");
  } else if (duration.as('minutes') >= 1) {
    return duration.toFormat("m 'minutes' s 'seconds'");
  } else {
    return duration.toFormat("s 'seconds'");
  }
}

// Example usage
const seconds = 864000; // Your duration in seconds
const duration = Duration.fromObject({ seconds });
const humanFriendlyDuration = formatDuration(duration);

console.log(humanFriendlyDuration);

In this example, formatDuration checks the length of the duration and chooses a format based on the magnitude of the duration. This function is very basic and can be extended to handle more specific cases or formatting preferences.

Luxon for Human-Friendly Durations created at Tue Jan 20 1970 18:54:18 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)