在PHP中将时间戳转换为时间？

Question

I know this question has been asked several times and I found so many tutorials, blog posts about converting timestamp to ago time in php..

I have tried countless codes and nothing seems to work for me...

I either get a blank page with no errors (i have error rerposting on my php page), or I get some strange numbers in my page..

so I thought someone here could shed a light on this for me..

Basically I am saving date like so:

$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

I simply save it in mysql database...

and I echo it like so:

 echo $date;

so now what I need to know is how I can convert the echo $date; to something like 1 minutes ago, 10 minutes ago, 1 hour ago etc etc every time the page closes and reopens?

I did try so many functions that I found on google and noon seem to do anything!

could someone please advise on this issue?

Thanks

EDIT:

I used this code as stated in the answer but I still get the $date echo-ed exactly the same way as its stored in the database which is this format: 2014-10-06 22:54:54

$date = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

$time1 = new DateTime($date);
$now = new DateTime();
$interval = $time1->diff($now);


if ($interval->y) $date = $interval->y . ' years';
elseif ($interval->m) $date = $interval->m . ' months';
elseif ($interval->d) $date = $interval->d . ' days';
elseif ($interval->h) $date = $interval->h . ' hours';
elseif ($interval->i) $date = $interval->i . ' minutes';


echo $date;

Answer 1

You should use the DateTime class to get the difference between 2 times, ie;

$time1 = new DateTime('2014-10-06 09:00:59');
$now = new DateTime();
$interval = $time1->diff($now,true);

and then use that difference (which is a DateInterval object, $interval) to find the smallest time difference like this;

if ($interval->y) echo $interval->y . ' years';
elseif ($interval->m) echo $interval->m . ' months';
elseif ($interval->d) echo $interval->d . ' days';
elseif ($interval->h) echo $interval->h . ' hours';
elseif ($interval->i) echo $interval->i . ' minutes';
else echo "less than 1 minute";

which should echo (at time of writing) 13 hours.

Hope this helps.