Re: [Boost-users] [date_time] extract date from string using a list of patterns

From: Brian Neal (bgneal_at_[hidden])
Date: 2006-06-27 16:38:06

> Thats why I was looking into it this way, I was hoping not to have to
> create my own parser.  I'm actually kinda of surprised that there isn't
> a open source natural language date string parser out there already.

GNU date is such a library. In PHP, there is the strtotime() function,
which I believe uses GNU date C code to parse stuff like what you
list. It accepts a bewildering variety of strings like "now", "last
Monday", "10 September 2004", "10 Sep 2004", "+1 week 2 days 3
seconds", etc. I can't find a GNU link for you though. But here is the
man page for PHP's strtotime() for a starting point:

http://us3.php.net/manual/en/function.strtotime.php

Good luck