Natural Language Date Service update

I received a request to make the Natural Language Date Service work with formats like “+3 5pm” to create a date in 3 days at 5pm. Previously you couldn’t add a time to a “+x” format.

I also removed the dependency on the Ruby Chronic gem; it always defaults to PHP’s date parser now. The syntax is a little pickier, but if you keep it short it pretty much always works.

• “date today” gives you “4/25/13”
• “date tomorrow 3pm” gives you “4/26/13 03:00 PM”
• “local today” gives you (well, me) “2013-4-25”
• “short today” gives you “Thu, Apr 25, 2013”
• “long today 5pm” gives you “Thursday, April 25, 2013 05:00 PM”
• “short +5 3pm” gives you “Tue, Apr 30, 2013 03:00 PM”

See the original post for more details, and download the updated service below.