Javascript to determine date and output either "time" if it is today, "yesterday" for yesterday, and the actual date if it is before then

Question

I am creating an simple email client and I want the inbox to display the date that the email was received in the format:

Today at 13:17

Yesterday at 20:38

13 January at 17:15

21 December 2012 @ 18:12

I am retrieving the data from a database, outputting it to xml (so everything can be done through AJAX) and printing the results to a <ul><li> format.

The Date and Time are stored separately in the format:

Date(y-m-d)

Time(H:i:s)

I see that something like that is possible with php. Here - PHP: date "Yesterday", "Today"

Is this possible using javascript?

Answer 1

I would go about with something like this

function getDisplayDate(year, month, day) {
    today = new Date();
    today.setHours(0);
    today.setMinutes(0);
    today.setSeconds(0);
    today.setMilliseconds(0);
    compDate = new Date(year,month-1,day); // month - 1 because January == 0
    diff = today.getTime() - compDate.getTime(); // get the difference between today(at 00:00:00) and the date
    if (compDate.getTime() == today.getTime()) {
        return "Today";
    } else if (diff <= (24 * 60 * 60 *1000)) {
        return "Yesterday";
    } else { 
        return compDate.toDateString(); // or format it what ever way you want
    }
}

than you should be able to get the date like this:

getDisplayDate(2013,01,14);