comparison: README
README
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| 1 ndp is a "natural date parser" library. It allows you to convert natural language user input to a more machine-friendly time value. | |
| 2 | |
| 3 ## Demo | |
| 4 An example utility is provided called readdate.lua, which reads lines from stdin, and | |
| 5 prints the interpreted date along with any text that wasn't considered part of the time | |
| 6 specification. | |
| 7 | |
| 8 ## Examples | |
| 9 | |
| 10 today | |
| 11 => Sun Jun 21 23:45:57 2009 (1245624357) [?,?] | |
| 12 | |
| 13 feed the cat in the morning | |
| 14 => Mon Jun 22 09:30:09 2009 (1245659409): feed the cat [13,28] | |
| 15 | |
| 16 go shopping next tuesday | |
| 17 => Tue Jun 23 23:46:27 2009 (1245797187): go shopping next [17,25] | |
| 18 | |
| 19 service the car in September | |
| 20 => Mon Sep 21 23:46:48 2009 (1253573208): service the car [16,29] | |
| 21 | |
| 22 Watch the games in July 2012 | |
| 23 => Sat Jul 21 23:48:06 2012 (1342910886): Watch the games [16,29] | |
| 24 | |
| 25 ## Usage | |
| 26 | |
| 27 ...is simple :) | |
| 28 | |
| 29 To get a time from an input string, simply do: | |
| 30 | |
| 31 local ndp = require "ndp"; -- Load the ndp library | |
| 32 local mytime = ndp.when("tomorrow"); -- Get the date tomorrow | |
| 33 print(os.date("%c", mytime)); -- Print it out | |
| 34 | |
| 35 A slightly more advanced usage is extracting information in the input string which | |
| 36 was not concerned with the time. This is useful for extracting things like "feed the cat" | |
| 37 from "feed the cat tomorrow afternoon". ndp.when() returns 2 extra values which are the start | |
| 38 and finish positions of the text it actually used in the string. By removing the text between | |
| 39 these positions you will be left with the real data. | |
| 40 | |
| 41 local ndp = require "ndp"; -- Load the ndp library | |
| 42 local mytime, startpos, endpos = ndb.when("tomorrow afternoon, feed the cat"); | |
| 43 local message = (line:sub(1, start)..line:sub(finish, -1)) -- returns ", feed the cat" | |
| 44 -- To make things a bit neater, we can use Lua's gsub function to trim leftover spaces and | |
| 45 -- punctuation from the result: | |
| 46 message = message:gsub("^[%s%p]+", ""):gsub("[%s%p]+$", ""); | |
| 47 print(message); -- feed the cat |
