Chronic date/time parser

Chronic is a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby. See below for the wide variety of formats Chronic will parse.

INSTALLATION

The best way to install Chronic is with RubyGems:

$ [sudo] gem install chronic

USAGE

You can parse strings containing a natural language date using the Chronic.parse method.

require 'rubygems'
require 'chronic'

Time.now   #=> Sun Aug 27 23:18:25 PDT 2006

#---

Chronic.parse('tomorrow')
  #=> Mon Aug 28 12:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('monday', :context => :past)
  #=> Mon Aug 21 12:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('this tuesday 5:00')
  #=> Tue Aug 29 17:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('this tuesday 5:00', :ambiguous_time_range => :none)
  #=> Tue Aug 29 05:00:00 PDT 2006

Chronic.parse('may 27th', :now => Time.local(2000, 1, 1))
  #=> Sat May 27 12:00:00 PDT 2000

Chronic.parse('may 27th', :guess => false)
  #=> Sun May 27 00:00:00 PDT 2007..Mon May 28 00:00:00 PDT 2007

See Chronic.parse for detailed usage instructions.

EXAMPLES

Chronic can parse a huge variety of date and time formats. Following is a small sample of strings that will be properly parsed. Parsing is case insensitive and will handle common abbreviations and misspellings.

Simple

• thursday
• november
• summer
• friday 13:00
• mon 2:35
• 4pm
• 6 in the morning
• friday 1pm
• sat 7 in the evening
• yesterday
• today
• tomorrow
• this tuesday
• next month
• last winter
• this morning
• last night
• this second
• yesterday at 4:00
• last friday at 20:00
• last week tuesday
• tomorrow at 6:45pm
• afternoon yesterday
• thursday last week

Complex

• 3 years ago
• 5 months before now
• 7 hours ago
• 7 days from now
• 1 week hence
• in 3 hours
• 1 year ago tomorrow
• 3 months ago saturday at 5:00 pm
• 7 hours before tomorrow at noon
• 3rd wednesday in november
• 3rd month next year
• 3rd thursday this september
• 4th day last week

Specific Dates

• January 5
• dec 25
• may 27th
• October 2006
• oct 06
• jan 3 2010
• february 14, 2004
• 3 jan 2000
• 17 april 85
• 5/27/1979
• 27/5/1979
• 05/06
• 1979-05-27
• Friday
• 5
• 4:00
• 17:00
• 0800

Specific Times (many of the above with an added time)

• January 5 at 7pm
• 1979-05-27 05:00:00
• etc

TIME ZONES

Chronic allows you to set which Time class to use when constructing times. By default, the built in Ruby time class creates times in your system's local time zone. You can set this to something like ActiveSupport's TimeZone class to get full time zone support.

>> Time.zone = "UTC"
>> Chronic.time_class = Time.zone
>> Chronic.parse("June 15 2006 at 5:45 AM")
=> Thu, 15 Jun 2006 05:45:00 UTC +00:00