TOtosh·Dec 27, 2022Submission
Chronic: A pure Ruby natural language date parser
4 points · Open discussionmojombo
chronic
Ruby2012–2022
mojombo / chronic
chronic
Chronic is a pure Ruby natural language date parser.
6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Chronic is a pure Ruby natural language date parser.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year6 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2012-04-30 05:39:16 UTC to 2022-12-27 21:47:22 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2013 | 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2014 | 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesIn my web apps, I make dates text boxes that can handle inputs like “next Thursday”, “Monday at 5p”, etc by running the inputs through https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
I like the idea of inputs being able to make sense of as wide of a variety or formats as possible.
For number inputs I’d like to build into Rails something that can handle basic math expressions. For example, a person can enter “120 / 2” in an input and get 60. This is useful for expense apps where you need to expense half of something.
If folks are interested, I can open source these bits. I’d like to expand them as much as possible to handle an even wider variety of inputs.
In Safari's date-picker is the cause of 1/3 of our customer support issuesReminds me of the Ruby library chronic https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
It's pretty good at natural language interpretation of dates, and the basic "from today" calculations, but cool to also see here natural expressions to parse between dates.
In Dte: A language for expressing and calculating date and timeFYI the ruby equivalent is chronic:
https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
In Dateparser: Python parser for human readable datesIf you want to do this in Ruby try Chronic. https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
In Show HN: Duckling – Open-source datetime expression parsingCool, reminds me of this chronic https://github.com/mojombo/chronic
I've been looking for a JS version. Perhaps this could be a starting point.
In Fast Natural Language Date Parser using Lex/Yacc/C