soaked and soaped

written September 14 2006 by

Kommen

tagged with

Development, Howto, Rails, Ruby, Tutorial

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Yesterday, while fighting against spam on the Ruby on Rails wiki, I came over a nice gem: Chronic

With Chronic you can easily parse natural language date and time formats into a DateTime object. You don’t have to mess around with regex to parse things manually. As gem, it’s easy to install and it’s also very handy to use.

Install it

$ gem install chronic
Thats it.

Use it

Put this in your model or controller file:


require 'chronic'


Then you can use Chronic.parse in your methods. E.g. Chronic.parse('tomorrow'),
Chronic.parse('monday', :context => :past), Chronic.parse('this tuesday 5:00')

Or more complex: Chronic.parse('3rd thursday this september'), Chronic.parse('3 months ago saturday at 5:00 pm')

And of course it can do a lot more! For a complete reference and more examples see chronic.rubyforge.org

Validate with it

 1 You can also use Chronic to validate malformed date strings:
 2 
 3 class Meeting < ActiveRecord::Base
 4 
 5   def validation
 6     errors.add :meeting_date, 'is not a valid date' if Chronic.parse(meeting_date.to_s).nil?
 7   end
 8 
 9 end

Ressources (Sites I’ve looked at and borrowed the code snippets) for writing this article

• http://bigbold.com/snippets/posts/show/2588
• http://chronic.rubyforge.org/