[ANN] Chronic-0.1.0

ruby-talk
1

I am pleased to announce the FIRST release of Chronic.

  project: http://rubyforge.org/projects/chronic
  docs: http://chronic.rubyforge.org/

This is a preview and feedback solicitation release. I would love to field any comments or questions you may have about the library.

==Description

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

==Installation

Chronic can be installed via RubyGems:

  $ sudo gem install chronic

==Usage

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

  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
  etc

==Limitations
  Chronic uses Ruby's built in Time class for all time storage and computation. Because of this, only times that the Time class can handle will be properly parsed. Parsing for times outside of this range will simply return nil. Support for a wider range of times is planned for a future release.

Time zones other than the local one are not currently supported. Support for other time zones is planned for a future release.

Tom

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

2

This is going to make part of my upcoming project SOOO much easier.

Thanks.

···
3

This is really really awesome. How did you implement stuff like "the
3rd tuesday in January"? I've been wrestling with that concept for
awhile not in a OS X Dashboard clock I made.
-Mat

···

On 9/7/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:

I am pleased to announce the FIRST release of Chronic.

  project: http://rubyforge.org/projects/chronic
  docs: http://chronic.rubyforge.org/

This is a preview and feedback solicitation release. I would love to field any comments or questions you may have about the library.

==Description

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

4

I am pleased to announce the FIRST release of Chronic.

Not had a chance to download yet, but you don't give an example of
something like "ten to four" or "quater past five tomorrow" - are those
supported? If they're not, then that's a feature suggestion :slight_smile:

5

* Tom Werner wrote:

I am pleased to announce the FIRST release of Chronic.

Nice work!
  

Chronic uses Ruby's built in Time class for all time storage and
computation. Because of this, only times that the Time class can
handle will be properly parsed. Parsing for times outside of this
range will simply return nil. Support for a wider range of times is
planned for a future release.

Some things that I noticed on Cygwin:

- I have to require 'time', otherwise, I'm getting an error "no method
parse for class Time". I'll put that into chronic.rb
- I had to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.5. With 1.8.4, I got lots of "time out of
range" errors
- it would be good if non-supported constructions return "nil" always,
but sometimes they return wrong parses, and some produce errors

Examples:

"now"
    -> Wed Sep 13 16:09:16 -0400 2006

"20 minutes before noon tomorrow"
    -> Wed Sep 13 23:40:00 -0400 2006
(= "20 minutes before midnight", how come?)

"in a few days"
    -> Thu Sep 14 16:12:30 -0400 2006
(= "in a day")

"hour"
    -> Wed Sep 13 16:37:00 -0400 2006
(= "the middle between the next full minute and the next hour")

Similarly, "day", "year" etc. make for weird answers. The same answers
come out if you combine them with ignored words, e.g.:

"one hour back" (= "hour" = "the middle between the next full minute and
the next hour")
"three days later" (= "day" = "the middle between the next full hour and
the next day")

"3 days later"
     -> Wed Sep 13 15:00:00 -0400 2006
(= "3 days" = "3 day" = "3 today")

"20 minutes before 3 yesterday"
    -> Error
    
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chronic-0.1.1/lib/chronic/repeaters/repeater_minute.
rb:11:in `offset': undefined method `+' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
[...]

For the future, it would be nice if it understood "five hours" as well
as "5 hours".

I'm working in NLP and ready to help.

···

--
Pentiums melt in your PC, not in your hand.

6

Mat Schaffer wrote:

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

This is really really awesome. How did you implement stuff like "the
3rd tuesday in January"? I've been wrestling with that concept for
awhile not in a OS X Dashboard clock I made.
-Mat

Chronic uses a compiler approach, so the date is parsed, tokenized, and then run through a list of possible matches. The first matching rule fires off a handler that knows how to deal with that pattern. To handle things like "3rd tuesday in january", it goes something like this:

3rd [ordinal-3]
tuesday [repeater-dayname-tuesday]
in [pointer-future]
january [repeater-monthname-january]

Which matches a pattern that knows to look for the next future January, and beginning with the start of that month, look for the next future Tuesday three times. There are classes that represent each of the possible repeaters (there a lot of them!), and know everything about how to find the next, previous, or this span, and to do offsets. Examine the source code if you're really interested, it shouldn't be too hard to grok.

Tom

···

On 9/7/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

7

benjohn@fysh.org wrote:

I am pleased to announce the FIRST release of Chronic.
    
Not had a chance to download yet, but you don't give an example of
something like "ten to four" or "quater past five tomorrow" - are those
supported? If they're not, then that's a feature suggestion :slight_smile:

Currently not supported, but it's on the todo list!

Tom

···

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

8

Hey Tom,

Not sure if you have seen DateBocks (http://datebocks.inimit.com), it
does much of the same in JavaScript.

Very cool plugin indeed, if I do say so myself :wink:

-NSHB

···

On 9/7/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:

Mat Schaffer wrote:
> On 9/7/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:
>> Chronic is a natural language date/time parser written in pure Ruby.
>> See below for the wide variety of formats Chronic will parse.
>
> This is really really awesome. How did you implement stuff like "the
> 3rd tuesday in January"? I've been wrestling with that concept for
> awhile not in a OS X Dashboard clock I made.
> -Mat

Chronic uses a compiler approach, so the date is parsed, tokenized, and
then run through a list of possible matches. The first matching rule
fires off a handler that knows how to deal with that pattern. To handle
things like "3rd tuesday in january", it goes something like this:

3rd [ordinal-3]
tuesday [repeater-dayname-tuesday]
in [pointer-future]
january [repeater-monthname-january]

Which matches a pattern that knows to look for the next future January,
and beginning with the start of that month, look for the next future
Tuesday three times. There are classes that represent each of the
possible repeaters (there a lot of them!), and know everything about how
to find the next, previous, or this span, and to do offsets. Examine the
source code if you're really interested, it shouldn't be too hard to grok.

Tom

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

--
Nathaniel Steven Henry Brown

Open Source Insight - http://nshb.net
Open Source Development - http://inimit.com
Open Source Training - http://osevents.com

9

Okay, so you use an itertive approach. I made this clock for OS X's
dashboard that does it using a formula borrowed from another widget.
No-one I've showed it to has been able to figure out just what it
does. If you're interested, I suppose it'd be better suited to an
offline discussion. Feel free to email me.
-Mat

···

On 9/7/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:

Chronic uses a compiler approach, so the date is parsed, tokenized, and
then run through a list of possible matches. The first matching rule
fires off a handler that knows how to deal with that pattern. To handle
things like "3rd tuesday in january", it goes something like this:

3rd [ordinal-3]
tuesday [repeater-dayname-tuesday]
in [pointer-future]
january [repeater-monthname-january]

Which matches a pattern that knows to look for the next future January,
and beginning with the start of that month, look for the next future
Tuesday three times. There are classes that represent each of the
possible repeaters (there a lot of them!), and know everything about how
to find the next, previous, or this span, and to do offsets. Examine the
source code if you're really interested, it shouldn't be too hard to grok.

10

Nathaniel Brown wrote:

Hey Tom,

Not sure if you have seen DateBocks (http://datebocks.inimit.com), it
does much of the same in JavaScript.

I did indeed see DateBocks, and like it very much! For a lot of use cases, your solution is perfect. The immediate verification you do (with JS) is very cool.

I admit freely that Chronic tends a bit towards the academic, but I hope it will find its place. You can do some fun things with Chronic like setting the context to the past, setting a "now" date on which to base everything, specifying a block of 12 hours to use in case of unadorned times (like 5:00), and returning the entire time span for date/times that are longer than one second.

Tom

···

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

11

I have been looking at Runt and was wondering if there is planned
support for something similar here such as natural language ranges to
create temporal expressions "every other Monday between 16:00 and 10pm
except 9/18/06"

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

12

For one, on unix systems it'd make a great frontend to at

martin

···

On 9/8/06, Tom Werner <tom@helmetstohardhats.org> wrote:

I admit freely that Chronic tends a bit towards the academic, but I hope
it will find its place. You can do some fun things with Chronic like
setting the context to the past, setting a "now" date on which to base
everything, specifying a block of 12 hours to use in case of unadorned
times (like 5:00), and returning the entire time span for date/times
that are longer than one second.

13

Josh Martin wrote:

I have been looking at Runt and was wondering if there is planned support for something similar here such as natural language ranges to create temporal expressions "every other Monday between 16:00 and 10pm except 9/18/06"

Recurring events (e.g. every monday) and time ranges (e.g. 9am-5pm) are planned. Chronic's architecture should make these enhancements relatively straightforward. If you have specific requirements/use cases you're looking to see implemented, please post them as feature requests on the tracker at rubyforge.org/projects/chronic.

Tom

···

--
Tom Werner
Helmets to Hardhats
Software Developer
tom@helmetstohardhats.org
www.helmetstohardhats.org

14

I've followed the install instructions perfectly. I can only require
'chronice' after i require 'rubygems'. And then there is a problem?
Any ideas? :

~> irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'chronic'
LoadError: no such file to load -- chronic
        from (irb):1:in `require'
        from (irb):1
irb(main):002:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true
irb(main):003:0> require 'chronic'
NameError: uninitialized constant Chronic::RepeaterSeason
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chronic-0.1.0/lib/chronic/repeaters/repeater_season_name.rb:1
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in
`require'
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chronic-0.1.0/lib/chronic.rb:22
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/chronic-0.1.0/lib/chronic.rb:21
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in
`require'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:182:in
`activate'
        from /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:181:in
`activate'
        from
/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:26:in
`require'
        from (irb):3
irb(main):004:0>

···

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.