Date Parser

A lightweight JavaScript date library for parsing and formatting natural language relative dates.

An small example set of strings that can be parsed:

two seconds
1 second
every 4 days
every other day
1 hour from now
after 2 hours
once per hour
every 48 hours

Using with Node

Install with npm:

npm install dateparser --save

Using with Browser

Bower

You can use Bower to install.

bower install dateparser
bower install jhaynie/dateparser

JS files

If you don't use Bower as a package manager, you can copy the minified JS from dateparser.min.js to the location of your web assets directory and inclue it in your HTML manually.

API

The API has only 2 methods parse and format.

Parse

To parse a date, call parse with a string of text. The result is an object with two properties: value (Number) and relative (Boolean). The value property is the milliseconds value. The relative property indicates if the value is a relative date or a recurring date.

var result = dateparser.parse('every 1 hour');
console.log('%d', result.value);

If the results relative property is true, the value will be a date in milliseconds format from Date.now(). If the reuslts relative property is false, the value will be the absolute milliseconds value of the parsed string (for example, 1 seconds will be returned as 1000).

Format

Format a result object returned from parse in a human readable format.

var result = dateparser.parse('every 1 hour');
console.log(dateparser.format(result));

License

Copyright (c) 2015 by Jeff Haynie. Licensed under the Apache-2.0 license.