Minute

Flexible Natural Language Date/Time parsing library for Ruby (1.9.x)

Feature

• Flexible Natural Language parsing
• Source code is small, readable and maintainable
• Can parse short or long sentence when date/time is included

Approach

Chronic has been an amazing gem, but I learned its limitation. It cannot parse long sentence or it will give you nil as a resultant value. Chronic's code design is difficult to maintain.

I was thinking what if I can create a simple Ruby library with the same approach, but more flexible and more features. Thus, Minute was created to address this problem.

Examples:

Chronic.parse("I have to meet my friend on December 13 in Dallas, TX")
#=> nil

Minute.parse("I have to meet my friend on December 13 in Dallas, TX")
#=> 2012-12-13 00:00:00 -0600

Installation

Gemfile

gem 'minute'

RubyGem

gem install minute

Usage

require 'minute'

Minute.parse("Hi! I am Ruby. I was born on Feb 24 1993. My father taught me to make programmers happy.")
#=> 1993-02-24 00:00:00 -0600

Minute.parse("Birthday party is tomorrow night!", now: Time.now)
#=> => 2012-05-01 11:20:48 -0500

Speed

Minute is using String#index? or Regular Expression to recognize the date or time. String#index? is using Rabin-Karp String Search algorithm, which it is making the search faster.

                           user     system      total        real
minute                12.750000   0.080000  12.830000 ( 12.833267)
chronic               97.860000   0.130000  97.990000 ( 97.983466)

TODO

Minute is still young. Some features are being added soon.

Planned to add the following:

• This december
• Last Janurary
• between 8am and 5pm
• between Jan and July
• every weekend
• this morning
• tonight
• and more..

Contribution

If you discover bugs or want to help or improve it, Pull Requests are welcome.

Ensure that your Pull request is using a topic branch for patching, improving, refactoring, etc.

License

Minute is licensed under the MIT License.