chronic
tom preston-werner’s chronic is a natural language date and time parser in ruby. with it, you can turn plain english from all those non-programmer humans using web applications and conveniently turn them into datetime objects =>
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
looks like a souped-up successor to lou zell’s nickel gem.