regular expressions for dates.

June 8, 2006 2:39 AM

Is there a good standard language for specifying complex date expressions, e.g. '4th Fridays in month that are not last Fridays', or '3d workday in year', or 'every other Thursday except holidays'?

I'm thinking of implementing something that could use such a date language. The best shots at this I know are pcal and Date::Manip::ParseDate, but I'd like to do more.

This has been hard to search for, as the obvious terms are so generic, so I'm appealing to the geeks of the hive mind: has this been done better already?

posted by Zed_Lopez to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Yes. It's a Unix program called remind. Less powerful but still pretty decent is the GNU date input syntax.
posted by evariste at 3:41 AM on June 8, 2006

PHP functions like strtotime() speak the GNU date input syntax.
posted by evariste at 3:48 AM on June 8, 2006

strtotime()
posted by evariste at 3:49 AM on June 8, 2006

Also take a peek at Quartz
posted by zeoslap at 6:58 AM on June 8, 2006

If you do go the 'remind' route, I wrote an article for 43 Folders on it, so let me know if I can be of any help. E-mail's in the profile. I'm not sure it's precisely what you're asking for, however.
posted by WCityMike at 11:29 AM on June 9, 2006