Settings

Theme

Show HN: My Weekend Project – Automatically determine date format string

date-format.xyz

28 points by lotkowskim 8 years ago · 10 comments

Reader

anonfunction 8 years ago

Interesting that there is another tool[1] on Show HN right now that does this but for strftime instead of moment.js, I guess I need to build one for Golang's weird time formatting.

1. http://strftime.guru/

continuational 8 years ago

I made a similar tool that could take almost arbitrery text strings like “mar 27, ’09” or “07/08/97” and generate a list of all valid interpretations. Eg. “07/08/97” would generate [{d: 7, m: 8, y: 97}, {d: 8, m: 7, y: 97}], but not any where 97 is a day or month, since that wouldn’t be a valid date.

fiatjaf 8 years ago

I don't know how it is supposed to work: https://screenshots.firefox.com/43Qs5xpvJ3Jm1oHi/date-format...

Why are there two different fields? I imagined only one would do the job.

  • lotkowskimOP 8 years ago

    It's to remove ambiguity (not all), i.e. you select a date and then specify how you want it to look. For example, the date 12/05/2017 can be interpreted as either DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY but if you select a date first and then describe your desired format we can exclude one of the possibilities.

    • 0x62 8 years ago

      Perhaps consider removing the choice? For example, have only one input (the desired format) and above it some text saying "How would you format '28/03/2018 21:37'?".

      This removes the confusion of two inputs, and provided you select an unambiguous baseline date (day & hour > 12) it should be more clear.

lotkowskimOP 8 years ago

Need to clean up the code and then I will upload it to Github :) Also let me know if there are any formats that don't work for you.

lozzo 8 years ago

just a suggestion but can we get a bit more than one page with a couple of fields ? It's okay to get straight to the point and being minimalistic but a few infos about the author and whether there is a github repo for the code... those things would help

  • jamestimmins 8 years ago

    I'm genuinely curious, why would that help? Would that change the way you viewed the tool?

Keyboard Shortcuts

j
Next item
k
Previous item
o / Enter
Open selected item
?
Show this help
Esc
Close modal / clear selection