Intelligent Date & Time parsing

[castironpi at gmail.com]

On Mar 7, 5:00 pm, shak... at gmail.com wrote:
> On Mar 7, 4:35 pm, Jeffrey Froman <jeff... at fro.man> wrote:
>
> > shak... at gmail.com wrote:
> > > I need
> > > something to parse user input for a django app, and it's awesome to be
> > > able to write "last monday", "a year ago", or "10pm tuesday" like
> > > PHP's strtotime.
>
> > Django comes with some pretty handy filters for doing this sort of
> > formatting. Check out the "date", "now", "timesince" and "timeuntil"
> > filters here:
>
> >http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/templates/#built-in-filter...
>
> > Jeffrey
>
> Very cool - that's definitely handy to know for the output side of
> things. I was mostly interested in writing a custom widget for
> handling datetime input, 'cause I can't imagine anyone being studious
> enough to use the 2008-03-07 12:00:00 format all the time... besides,
> it's hard to type! I'd much rather allow for users to just be able to
> type "12pm today".
>
> So much to learn, so little time!
>
> Jacob

With some acquaintence with the user, a program can even honor,
"remind me 'later' to...".

Will you assign meanings to weird ambiguities like, 'last
February' (No, I mean laaaaaaast February.) if it's April and
"tomorrow" if it's 4 a.m.?  Just raise an exception:
TimeOfDayException: "Yes, but it's 4 a.m." (or, Those probabilities
are close.)

The vocabulary for referring to time isn't that large.  What did I
miss?

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, ago, from now, later, after, before,
[units], [absolutes], wikipedia.

But what's the elegant way to structure the expression?