Android calculating minutes/hours/days from point in time
android, date, datetime, java, twitter
Solution
`long milliseconds = date.getTime() - new Date().getTime();`
that will run the calculation based on the difference between the date of the tweet and now.
At the moment, you are basing your calculation on `date.getTime()` which is the number of milliseconds since midnight on 1-Jan-1970. Because you also introduces modulos, your current function gives you the time elapsed between midnight UTC and the tweet.
Problem
I am parsing twitters and i want to display how long ago it was since the twitter was posted. But it doesn't seem to be calculating correctly. I got the formula from another post here on Stackoverflow and i tried to build the return statement from it. ``` public static String getTwitterDate(Date date){ long milliseconds = date.getTime(); int minutes = (int) ((milliseconds / (1000*60)) % 60); int hours = (int) ((milliseconds / (1000*60*60)) % 24); if (hours > 0){ if (hours == 1) return "1 hour ago"; else if (hours < 24) return String.valueOf(hours) + " hours ago"; else { int days = (int)Math.ceil(hours % 24); if (days == 1) return "1 day ago"; else return String.valueOf(days) + " days ago"; } } else { if (minutes == 0) return "less than 1 minute ago"; else if (minutes == 1) return "1 minute ago"; else return String.valueOf(minutes) + " minutes ago"; } } ``` Parsing the twitter date/time with this (also from a post on Stackoverflow) ``` public static Date parseTwitterDate(String date) { final String TWITTER = "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss Z"; SimpleDateFormat sf = new SimpleDateFormat(TWITTER, Locale.ENGLISH); sf.setLenient(true); try { return sf.parse(date); } catch (ParseException e) { // TODO Auto-generated catch block e.printStackTrace(); } return null; } ``` Example of a twitter date: "created_at":"Sat, 30 Jun 2012 14:44:40 +0000", As far as i can tell, the twitters are getting parsed correctly but not calculated correctly (getTwitterDate). That returns 11 hours some times when its a difference of 4-5 hours.