Natural/Relative days in Python

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Twitter dates in specific are interesting because they are relative only for the first day. After 24 hours they just show the month and day. After a year they start showing the last two digits of the year. Here’s a sample function that does something more akin to Twitter relative dates, though it always shows the year too after 24 hours. It’s US locale only, but you can always alter it as needed.

# tested in Python 2.7
import datetime
def prettydate(d):
    diff = datetime.datetime.utcnow() - d
    s = diff.seconds
    if diff.days > 7 or diff.days < 0:
        return d.strftime('%d %b %y')
    elif diff.days == 1:
        return '1 day ago'
    elif diff.days > 1:
        return '{} days ago'.format(diff.days)
    elif s <= 1:
        return 'just now'
    elif s < 60:
        return '{} seconds ago'.format(s)
    elif s < 120:
        return '1 minute ago'
    elif s < 3600:
        return '{} minutes ago'.format(s/60)
    elif s < 7200:
        return '1 hour ago'
    else:
        return '{} hours ago'.format(s/3600)

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