free form date field

Question

I was reading this archive on joel on sw http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/TwoStories.html

here he mentions he wanted to make a date field free format. Then I thought how would someone do that? ofcourse search in gmail does it.

has anyone implemented this before? and how?

Answer 1

PHP's strtotime() is a very nice implementation of this.

Answer 2

You could check out any of the following date parsing implementations

• Google's parsedatetime on google code (http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/)
• python-dateutil (http://labix.org/python-dateutil)
• javascript lib (http://www.datejs.com/)
• perl (http://search.cpan.org/~thinc/DateTime-Format-Flexible-0.05/)

Answer 3

If you have users both side of the Atlantic you'll need to prevent 09/10/11 style dates explicitly as much confusion will happen - either require the month in letters or use a drop-down for it and abandon free-form. Remember 09/11 is the ninth of November in Europe. Using an IP address's location to disambiguate fails because Europeans and Americans can cross the Atlantic!