does chronic have any options of date format it parses? (ruby)

Question

I need to tell chronic that the format of date is day-month-year is that possible? The data I pass to chronic could also be words today/yesterday/2 days ago.

Currently chronic gives me 2 Dec 2010 instead of 12 Feb 2010 from 12-02-2010

The only solution I can think of is to swap day and month before passing the string to chronic.

require 'chronic'   

puts "12-02-2010 = #{Chronic.parse('12-02-2010')}"  #should be 12 Feb 2010


puts "yesteday = #{Chronic.parse('yesterday')}" #working ok
puts "Today = #{Chronic.parse('today')}"        #working ok

Answer 1

The output of chronic can be easily formatted. chronic.parse returns a time object. You can use strftime for formatting as described here.

puts Chronic.parse('today').strftime('%d %b %Y') #=> 23 Feb 2010

As far as the input is concerned, I cannot find anything in chronic that will do it automatically. Manipulating the input string is probably the way to go.

Edit: Chronic has an internal pre_normalize that you could over-ride..

require 'chronic'

puts Chronic.parse('12-02-2010').strftime('%d %b %Y') #=> 02 Dec 2010

module Chronic
  class << self
    alias chronic__pre_normalize pre_normalize  

    def pre_normalize(text)
      text = text.split(/[^\d]/).reverse.join("-") if text =~ /^\d{1,2}[^\d]\d{1,2}[^\d]\d{4}$/
      text = chronic__pre_normalize(text)
      return text
    end
  end
end
puts Chronic.parse('12-02-2010').strftime('%d %b %Y') #=> 12 Feb 2010