any-date-parser

The most comprehensive and accurate date parser for Node and browsers. It uses Intl to provide parsing support for all installed locales.

Installation

Option 1: NPM

npm install any-date-parser

Option 2: CDN

<script src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/browser-bundle.js"></script>

Option 3: CDN import

<script type="module">
  import anyDateParser from 'https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/[email protected]/dist/index.mjs';
</script>

Table of Contents

1. Breaking changes
2. Motivation
3. Usage
4. Supported formats
5. Locale support
6. List of all supported locales
7. Unit tests
8. Contributing

Breaking changes

Upgrading from v1 => v2

• fromString and fromAny now return a MaybeValidDate instance that is a subclass of Date. Previously, they returned Date | { invalid: string; }. MaybeValidDate has an invalid property if invalid, and an isValid() function whether valid or not. If in v1 you simply checked for an invalid property, v2 will behave the same.
• If an input string does not match any known format, it will attempt a fuzzy match, looking for date parts individually.
• Custom patterns are no longer supported

Motivation

1. The APIs I consume have a lot of different date formats
2. I want to create REST APIs that accept all major formats
3. I want to handle user-input dates
4. I want to support dates in other languages according to JavaScript's new Intl global object

Usage

There are three ways to use any-date-parser:

1.) Use the parser to get a Date:

• parser.fromAny(any, locale) - Return a Date object given a Date, Number or string to parse.
• parser.fromString(string, locale) - Parses a string and returns a Date object. Returns invalid if string is not a string

Example:

import parser from 'any-date-parser';
parser.fromString('2020-10-15');
// same as new Date(2020, 9, 15, 0, 0, 0, 0)

2.) Use the parser to pull out known parts. The function parser.attempt(string, locale) returns an object with one or more integer values for the following keys: year, month, day, hour, minute, second, millisecond, offset. Note: month is returned as a normal 1-based integer, not the 0-based integer the Date() constructor uses.

Examples:

import parser from 'any-date-parser';
parser.attempt('15 Oct 2020 at 6pm');
/* returns:
{
  year: 2020,
  month: 10,
  day: 15,
  hour: 18,
}
*/

parser.attempt('Oct 15');
/* returns:
{
  month: 10,
  day: 15,
}
*/

parser.attempt('Hello world');
/* returns:
{ invalid: 'Unable to parse "Hello World"' }
*/

parser.attempt('');
/* returns:
{ invalid: 'Unable to parse "(empty string)"' }
*/

3.) Use the aliases on the Date constructor:

• Date.fromAny(any, locale) - Return a Date object given a Date, Number or string to parse.
• Date.fromString(string, locale) - Parses a string and returns a Date object. Returns invalid if string is not a string

Example:

import 'any-date-parser';
Date.fromString('2020-10-15');
// same as new Date(2020, 9, 15, 0, 0, 0, 0)

4.) There are npm packages that integrate any-date-parser directly into popular date libraries:

• Luxon: luxon-parser
• DayJS: dayjs-parser
• Moment: moment-parseplus [deprecated]

Supported formats

Summary:

• 24 hour time
• 12 hour time
• timezone offsets
• timezone abbreviations
• year month day
• year monthname day
• month day year
• monthname day year
• day month year
• day monthname year
• +/-/ago periods
• now/today/yesterday/tomorrow
• Twitter
• Fuzzy

Exhaustive list of date formats

Locale Support

any-date-parser supports any locale that your runtime's Intl.DateTimeFormat supports. In browsers that usually means the operating system language. In Node, that means the compiled language or the icu modules included. The unit tests run on Bun, which ships with full ICU data, so every locale is available without any extra dependency.

This means support for international formats such as:

• es-MX - viernes, 27 de septiembre de 2024, 10:39:50 a.m. GMT-6
• bn-BD - শুক্রবার, ২৭ সেপ্টেম্বর, ২০২৪ এ ১০:৩৬:১০ AM GMT -৬
• el-GR - Παρασκευή 27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 στις 10:38:16 π.μ. GMT-6
• hi-IN - शुक्रवार, 27 सितंबर 2024 को 10:39:13 am GMT-6 बजे
• th-TH - วันศุกร์ที่ 27 กันยายน พ.ศ. 2567 เวลา 10 นาฬิกา 40 นาที 28 วินาที GMT-6
• ta-IN - வெள்ளி, 27 செப்டம்பர், 2024 அன்று 10:43:05 AM GMT-6
• hu-HU - 2024. szeptember 27., péntek 10:44:41 GMT-6

Note: For locales that use the Buddhist year (such as th-TH), any-date-parser automatically subtracts 543 years to normalize it to the Gregorian Calendar year.

Check out the list of all supported locales

Limitations

• Dates with years before 1000 must have 4 digits, i.e. leading zeros.
• any-date-parser cannot parse Dates before 0100 or after 9999 though JavaScript support is only limited where milliseconds is between -8640000000000000 through 8640000000000000, which allows a range of -271821-04-20T00:00:00.000Z through +275760-09-13T00:00:00.000Z.
• Only English timezone names are supported
• Does not support the Hijri calendar (islamic-umalqura)
• Does not support right-to-left script locales such as ar (Arabic) and he (Hebrew)

Unit tests

Tests run on Bun. You can git checkout any-date-parser and run its tests.

• To install dev dependencies, run bun install
• To run tests, run bun run test (which is bun test with TZ=UTC set, so results do not vary with your machine's timezone)
• To re-run tests on change, run bun run test-watch
• To check coverage, run bun run coverage (prints a table and writes coverage/lcov.info)
• Note - Bun ships with full ICU data, so no extra i18n install step is needed

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Please open a GitHub ticket for bugs or feature requests. Please make a pull request for any fixes or new code you'd like to be incorporated.

Exhaustive list of date formats

24 hour time (any date format followed by a 24-hour time expression)

• 17:41:28
• 17:41:28Z
• 17:41:28.999Z
• 17:41:28.999999Z
• 17:41:28.999999999Z
• 17:41:28 MST
• 17:41:28 Eastern Daylight Time
• 17:41:28 GMT+03:00
• 17:41:28 GMT-9
• 17:41:28-09:00
• 17:41:28+0900

12 hour time (any date format followed by a 12-hour time expression)

• 9:26:53 am
• 9:26:53 a.m.
• 9:26:53am
• 9:26pm
• 9pm

year month day

• 2016-09-24
• 2016-9-24
• 2016/9/24
• 20160924

day monthname year

• Wednesday, 01 January 2020
• Wednesday 01 January 2020
• Wed, 01 January 2020
• Wed 01 January 2020
• 01 January 2020
• 01-January-2020
• 1 Jan 2020
• 1-Jan-2020
• 01 Jan 20
• 1 Jan 20

monthname day year

• Sunday, March 27 2016
• Sunday March 27 2016
• Sun, March 27 2016
• Sun March 27 2016
• March 27 2016
• Mar 27, 2016
• Mar 27 2016

month day year

• 03/14/2020
• 03-14-2020
• 3/14/2020
• 3-14-2020
• 03/14/20
• 03-14-20

day month year

• 14/03/2020
• 14.03.2020
• 14/3/2020
• 14.3.2020
• 14/03/20
• 14.03.20
• 14/3/20
• 14.3.20

relative time

• 5 minutes ago
• -8 months
• in 13 days
• +21 weeks

monthname day

• Sunday, June 28
• Sunday June 28
• Sun, June 28
• Sun June 28
• June 28
• Jun 28

day monthname

• 16 March
• 16 Mar

month day (for locales: ee-TG, en locales US,AS,CA,FM,GH,GU,KE,MH,MP,VI,WS, locale jp-JP, and sm locales AS,SM)

• 03/14
• 03-14
• 3/14
• 3-14

day month

• 14/03
• 14.03
• 14/3
• 14.3

Twitter

• Fri Apr 09 12:53:54 +0000 2010

unix timestamp

• @1602604901

Microsoft JSON date string

• /Date(1601677889008-0700)/
• /Date(1601677889008)/

chinese

• 2020年09月26日
• 2020年9月26日
• 2020 年 9 月 26 日
• ２０１７年０８月３１日

fuzzy (some examples)

• On Wed 8 March in the year 2020
• In 1929, the stock market crashed on October 29