Rails: Customizing Time Ago in Words
Hi friends,
Whenever something is published to a site, we see in their posted time, it is written like about 2 minutes ago or about an hour ago. These kind of sentences displays how much time before the content was published. This thing can be achieved in rails using it's time_ago_in_words helper. How to use date time in rails has already been explained Date Time Helpers in Rails. time_ago_in_words can be used as:

	## pass the datetime stamp inside this helper function
	time_ago_in_words(any_date_time_stamp)

	## This will return the difference between the current time
	## and will display them like

	#=> about an hour

Now it will give the full string. Suppose you want to customize the string it returns you can override all the defaults texts that it returns. To do this you need to place this entire code inside the config/locales/en.yml

	en:
	    datetime:
		    distance_in_words:
		      about_x_hours:
		        one: about 1 hour
		        other: about %{count} hours
		      about_x_months:
		        one: about 1 month
		        other: about %{count} months
		      about_x_years:
		        one: about 1 year
		        other: about %{count} years
		      almost_x_years:
		        one: almost 1 year
		        other: almost %{count} years
		      half_a_minute: half a minute
		      less_than_x_minutes:
		        one: less than a minute
		        other: less than %{count} minutes
		      less_than_x_seconds:
		        one: less than 1 second
		        other: less than %{count} seconds
		      over_x_years:
		        one: over 1 year
		        other: over %{count} years
		      x_days:
		        one: 1 day
		        other: "%{count} days"
		      x_minutes:
		        one: 1 minute
		        other: "%{count} minutes"
		      x_months:
		        one: 1 month
		        other: "%{count} months"
		      x_seconds:
		        one: 1 second
		        other: "%{count} seconds"
		    prompts:
		      day: Day
		      hour: Hour
		      minute: Minute
		      month: Month
		      second: Seconds
		      year: Year

Thus by default it displays these texts whenever you use time_ago_in_words, so you can change whatever you want here, suppose you want to have these kind of modifications like: less than greater than should be replaced by its symbol, minutes should be replaced by "m", hours with "h", days with "d", months with "M" and year with "Y". Then the en.yml file can be changed to:

	en:
	    datetime:
		    distance_in_words:
		      about_x_hours:
		        one: 1h
		        other: %{count}h
		      about_x_months:
		        one: 1M
		        other: %{count}M
		      about_x_years:
		        one: 1Y
		        other: %{count}Y
		      almost_x_years:
		        one: 1Y
		        other: %{count}Y
		      half_a_minute: 0.5m
		      less_than_x_minutes:
		        one: < 1m
		        other: < %{count}m
		      less_than_x_seconds:
		        one: < 1s
		        other: < %{count}s
		      over_x_years:
		        one: > 1Y
		        other: > %{count}Y
		      x_days:
		        one: 1d
		        other: "%{count}d"
		      x_minutes:
		        one: 1m
		        other: "%{count}m"
		      x_months:
		        one: 1M
		        other: "%{count}M"
		      x_seconds:
		        one: 1s
		        other: "%{count}s"
		    prompts:
		      day: D
		      hour: h
		      minute: m
		      month: M
		      second: s
		      year: Y

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