Is there a natural language parser for dates/times in ColdFusion?

Question

Is there a natural language parser for date/times in ColdFusion?

Answer 1

I believe parseDateTime() and lsParseDateTime() are the closest to what you're looking for, from the library of built-in ColdFusion functions.

Check out Adobe's LiveDocs for other date/time functions.

Remember that you can also leverage any Java date/time class as well. Pete Freitag has an interesting post with some example code.

Answer 2

There's a (reportedly -- I've not used it) good one for Java called JChronic -- a port of the Ruby Chronic date parser. You could try using it.

It hasn't been updated since 2006, but should still be useful.

Answer 3

Since you are probably using it in a form anyway checkout Datejs, a very nice javascript date library that can parse a lot of dates. It is very easy to incorporate with CF.