Given a date String of the format given by the Twitter API, returns a display-formatted String representing the relative time difference, e.g. "2m", "6d", "23 May", "1 Jan 2014" depending on how great the time difference between now and the given date is. This, as of 2016-06-29, matches the behavior of the official Twitter app.

Just copy TimeFormatter.java into a Java class in your project, then call

String formattedTime = TimeFormatter.getTimeDifference(String dateString);

to turn a Twitter API-returned dateString into a String properly formatted for display that represents the relative time difference (matching Twitter's behavior when viewing a list of Tweets), or

String formattedAbsoluteTime = TimeFormatter.getTimeStamp(String rawJsonDate);

to turn a Twitter API-returned dateString into a String formatted like that of the official Twitter app's detailed Tweet view.

• Evan Wildenhain (ewilden)
• David Gisser (dgisser)
• Kristina Shia (kshia)