Tom Preston-Werner has pushed out version 0.3.0 of Chronic, the popular natural language date and time parsing library for Ruby. It's a significant release because the last was 0.2.3 back in July 2007! Grab it now with gem install chronic
Despite the long time between releases, Chronic hasn't gone without attention. It's been sitting on GitHub and attracting patches for years, but Tom (who's already pretty busy, y'know, running GitHub) has now decided to bundle it up and push it live.
What does 0.3.0 get you?
- Improved time-zone support
- Handles "on" in phrases like "10am on Saturday"
- Now ignores commas (which could throw it off before)
- Supports "weekend" and "weekday"
- Allows numeric timezone offsets (e.g. -0500)
- Support for seasons
- "a", "p", "am", and "pm" parsing
- The typical bugfixes and low level improvements
Chronic is basically a Ruby institution by now (I first posted about it in September 2006!) so check it out. But if you're still itching for other ways to work with dates and times, check out 3 New Date and Time Libraries for Rubyists from May 2010. Tickle is particular interesting as it allows you to parse natural language requests for recurring events rather than single times.