Laravel heavily uses Carbon library for date and time management, but there’s one package that extends Carbon to make it work better with local strings.

jenssegers/date has been downloaded over million times already, so for those who don’t know it yet, really recommended.

Easy installation

1. Run command:

composer require jenssegers/date

2. Add “use” statements wherever you want to use it

use Jenssegers\Date\Date;

3. Go on and use it:

// First - let's set the locale, to Spanish for example
Date::setLocale('es');

echo Date::now()->format('l j F Y H:i:s'); 
// lunes 16 abril 2018 00:06:16

echo Date::parse('-2 day')->timespan(); 
// 2 dias

echo Date::now()->subDays(10)->subMinutes(10)->timespan(); 
// 1 semana, 3 días, 10 minutos

My favorite feature is converting local text into Date object:

$date = Date::createFromFormat('l d F Y', 'lunes 9 abril 2018');

But be careful with that – if your date text is not recognized, you will see this: 

InvalidArgumentException
A textual month could not be found.

So I would advise to use try-catch:

try {
    $date = Date::createFromFormat('l d F Y', 'lunes 9 appril 2018');
    echo $date->timespan();
} catch (\InvalidArgumentException $exception) {
    echo 'Could not recognize the date';
}

More links: