Humanize Duration

I have the time in milliseconds and I want it to become "30 minutes" or "3 days, 1 hour". Enter Humanize Duration!

This library is actively maintained but no new features will be added.

Installation

This package is available as humanize-duration on npm and Bower. You can also include the JavaScript file in the browser.

npm install humanize-duration

Basic usage

With require (like in Node or with common build systems):

const humanizeDuration = require("humanize-duration");
humanizeDuration(12000);
// =&gt; "12 seconds"

With a `


By default, Humanize Duration will humanize down to the second, and will return a decimal for the smallest unit. It will humanize in English by default.

```js
humanizeDuration(3000);
// =&gt; "3 seconds"

humanizeDuration(2250);
// =&gt; "2.25 seconds"

humanizeDuration(97320000);
// =&gt; "1 day, 3 hours, 2 minutes"

Options

You can change the settings by passing options as the second argument.

language

Language for unit display. Accepts an ISO 639-1 code from one of the supported languages.

Default: "en".

humanizeDuration(3000, { language: "es" });
// =&gt; "3 segundos"

humanizeDuration(5000, { language: "ko" });
// =&gt; "5 초"

fallbacks

Array of fallback languages, if the provided language cannot be found. Like language, accepts an ISO 639-1 code from one of the supported languages. It works from left to right, choosing the first language that's found.

Default: [].

humanizeDuration(3000, {
  language: "bad language",
  fallbacks: ["en"],
});
// =&gt; "3 seconds"

humanizeDuration(3000, {
  language: "bad language",
  fallbacks: ["another bad language", "es"],
});
// =&gt; "3 segundos"

units

Array of possible units to use. Units are y, mo, w, d, h, m, s, and ms.

Units are skipped if their count is zero. For example, if you pass a duration of 1000 and units ["h", "m", "s"], the output will be "1 second".

Must be in descending order of unit size. For example, ["h", "m"] is valid but ["m", "h"] is not.

Default: ["y", "mo", "w", "d", "h", "m", "s"]

humanizeDuration(69000, { units: ["h", "m", "s", "ms"] });
// =&gt; "1 minute, 9 seconds"

humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ["h"] });
// =&gt; "1 hour"

humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ["m"] });
// =&gt; "60 minutes"

humanizeDuration(3600000, { units: ["d", "h"] });
// =&gt; "1 hour"

largest

Integer representing the maximum number of units to use.

Default: Infinity

humanizeDuration(1000000000000);
// =&gt; "31 years, 8 months, 1 week, 19 hours, 46 minutes, 40 seconds"

humanizeDuration(1000000000000, { largest: 2 });
// =&gt; "31 years, 8 months"

round

A boolean that, if true, rounds the smallest unit.

Default: false

humanizeDuration(1200);
// =&gt; "1.2 seconds"

humanizeDuration(1200, { round: true });
// =&gt; "1 second"

humanizeDuration(1600, { round: true });
// =&gt; "2 seconds"

delimiter

String to display between units.

Default: ", " in most languages, " ﻭ " for Arabic

humanizeDuration(22140000);
// =&gt; "6 hours, 9 minutes"

humanizeDuration(22140000, { delimiter: " and " });
// =&gt; "6 hours and 9 minutes"

spacer

String to display between the count and the word.

Default: " "

humanizeDuration(260040000);
// =&gt; "3 days, 14 minutes"

humanizeDuration(260040000, { spacer: " whole " });
// =&gt; "3 whole days, 14 whole minutes"

decimal

String to display between the integer and decimal parts of a count, if relevant.

Default depends on the language.

humanizeDuration(1200);
// =&gt; "1.2 seconds"

humanizeDuration(1200, { decimal: " point " });
// =&gt; "1 point 2 seconds"

conjunction

String to include before the final unit.

You can also set serialComma to false to eliminate the final comma.

Default: ""

humanizeDuration(22140000, { conjunction: " and " });
// =&gt; "6 hours and 9 minutes"

humanizeDuration(22141000, { conjunction: " and " });
// =&gt; "6 hours, 9 minutes, and 1 second"

humanizeDuration(22140000, { conjunction: " and ", serialComma: false });
// =&gt; "6 hours and 9 minutes"

humanizeDuration(22141000, { conjunction: " and ", serialComma: false });
// =&gt; "6 hours, 9 minutes and 1 second"

maxDecimalPoints

Integer that defines the maximum number of decimal points to show, if relevant. If undefined, the count will be converted to a string using Number.prototype.toString().

This does not round any numbers. See the round option.

Default: undefined

humanizeDuration(8123.456789);
// =&gt; "8.123456789 seconds"

humanizeDuration(8123.456789, { maxDecimalPoints: 3 });
// =&gt; "8.123 seconds"

humanizeDuration(8100, { maxDecimalPoints: 99 });
// =&gt; "8.1 seconds"

humanizeDuration(8000, { maxDecimalPoints: 99 });
// =&gt; "8 seconds"

humanizeDuration(7999, { maxDecimalPoints: 2 });
// =&gt; "7.99 seconds"

digitReplacements

Array of ten strings to which will replace the numerals 0-9. Useful if a language uses different numerals.

Default: undefined for most languages, ["۰", "١", "٢", "٣", "٤", "٥", "٦", "٧", "٨", "٩"] for Arabic

humanizeDuration(1234);
// =&gt; "1.234 seconds"

humanizeDuration(1234, {
  digitReplacements: [
    "Zero",
    "One",
    "Two",
    "Three",
    "Four",
    "Five",
    "Six",
    "Seven",
    "Eight",
    "Nine",
  ],
});
// =&gt; "One.TwoThreeFour seconds"

unitMeasures

Use this option with care. It is an advanced feature.

Object used to customize the value used to calculate each unit of time. Most useful when you want to update the length of years or months, which have ambiguous lengths.

Default: { y: 31557600000, mo: 2629800000, w: 604800000, d: 86400000, h: 3600000, m: 60000, s: 1000, ms: 1 }

humanizeDuration(2629800000);
// =&gt; "1 month"

humanizeDuration(2629800000, {
  unitMeasures: {
    y: 31557600000,
    mo: 30 * 86400000,
    w: 604800000,
    d: 86400000,
    h: 3600000,
    m: 60000,
    s: 1000,
    ms: 1,
  },
});
// =&gt; "1 month, 10 hours, 30 minutes"

Humanizers

If you find yourself setting same options over and over again, you can create a humanizer that changes the defaults, which you can still override later.

const spanishHumanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer({
  language: "es",
  units: ["y", "mo", "d"],
});

spanishHumanizer(71177400000);
// =&gt; "2 años, 3 meses, 2 días"

spanishHumanizer(71177400000, { units: ["d", "h"] });
// =&gt; "823 días, 19.5 horas"

You can also add new languages to humanizers. For example:

const shortEnglishHumanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer({
  language: "shortEn",
  languages: {
    shortEn: {
      y: () =&gt; "y",
      mo: () =&gt; "mo",
      w: () =&gt; "w",
      d: () =&gt; "d",
      h: () =&gt; "h",
      m: () =&gt; "m",
      s: () =&gt; "s",
      ms: () =&gt; "ms",
    },
  },
});

shortEnglishHumanizer(15600000);
// =&gt; "4 h, 20 m"

You can also add languages after initializing:

const humanizer = humanizeDuration.humanizer();

humanizer.languages.shortEn = {
  y: () =&gt; "y",
  // ...

Internally, the main humanizeDuration function is just a wrapper around a humanizer.

Supported languages

Humanize Duration supports the following languages:

Language	Code
Afrikaans	`af`
Albanian	`sq`
Amharic	`am`
Arabic	`ar`
Basque	`eu`
Bengali	`bn`
Bulgarian	`bg`
Catalan	`ca`
Central Kurdish	`ckb`
Chinese, simplified	`zh_CN`
Chinese, traditional	`zh_TW`
Croatian	`hr`
Czech	`cs`
Danish	`da`
Dutch	`nl`
English	`en`
Esperanto	`eo`
Estonian	`et`
Faroese	`fo`
Farsi/Persian	`fa`
Finnish	`fi`
French	`fr`
German	`de`
Greek	`el`
Hebrew	`he`
Hindi	`hi`
Hungarian	`hu`
Icelandic	`is`
Indonesian	`id`
Italian	`it`
Japanese	`ja`
Kannada	`kn`
Khmer	`km`
Korean	`ko`
Kurdish	`ku`
Lao	`lo`
Latvian	`lv`
Lithuanian	`lt`
Macedonian	`mk`
Mongolian	`mn`
Malay	`ms`
Marathi	`mr`
Norwegian	`no`
Polish	`pl`
Portuguese	`pt`
Romanian	`ro`
Russian	`ru`
Serbian	`sr`
Slovak	`sk`
Slovenian	`sl`
Spanish	`es`
Swahili	`sw`
Swedish	`sv`
Tamil	`ta`
Telugu	`te`
Thai	`th`
Turkish	`tr`
Ukrainian	`uk`
Urdu	`ur`
Uzbek	`uz`
Uzbek (Cyrillic)	`uz_CYR`
Vietnamese	`vi`
Welsh	`cy`

For a list of supported languages, you can use the getSupportedLanguages function. The results may not be in the same order every time.

humanizeDuration.getSupportedLanguages();
// =&gt; ["af", "ar", "bg", "bn", "ca", ...]

This function won't return any new languages you define; it will only return the defaults supported by the library.

Credits

Lovingly made by Evan Hahn with help from:

Martin Prins for language support
Filipi Siqueira for Portuguese support
Peter Rekdal Sunde for Norwegian support
Michał Janiec for Polish support
Eileen Li for Chinese support
Tommy Brunn for Swedish support
Giovanni Pellerano for Italian support
Rahma Sghaier for Arabic support
Evgenios Kastanias for Greek support
Oleksii Mylotskyi for Ukrainian support
Patrik Simek for Czech support
Toni Helminen for Finnish support
Vidmantas Drasutis for Lithuanian support
Manh Tuan for Vietnamese support
Leonard Lee for Indonesian & Malay support
Jesse Jackson for documentation help
Óli Tómas Freysson for Icelandic support
Saeed Ganji for Farsi/Persian support
Caner Elci for Bulgarian support
Matej Kolesár for Slovak support
Abdul Jalil for Urdu support
Wasuwat Limsuparhat for Thai support
Malikoun for Lao support
Villu Orav for Estonian support
Harijs Deksnis for Latvian support
Nirmala Thapa(Subit) for Faroese support
Fahad Kassim for Swahili support
Prayag Roy Choudhury for updating Mocha
Aryan Rawlani for Hindi support
Kristijan Jesenski for Slovenian support
Michal Karzel for improving Arabic support
Mikias Menjeta for Amharic support

Licensed under the permissive Unlicense. Enjoy!

Related modules

pretty-ms
angularjs-humanize-duration
millisec
HumanizeDuration.ts, a TypeScript version of this module
aurelia-time
Fork that adds a timeAdverb option
Fork that provides the duration in an abbreviated format, ex: 1d 2h 3m 4s

Most popular functions for humanize-duration

To help you get started, we’ve selected a few humanize-duration examples, based on popular ways it is used in public projects.

humanize-duration.humanizer

humanize-duration