mojombo/chronic

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

3254 stars · 449 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Chronic is a pure Ruby natural language date and time parser that converts phrases like 'tomorrow at 6:45pm' or '3rd wednesday in november' into Time objects or time spans. It handles a wide variety of formats, abbreviations, misspellings, and configurable options like endian precedence and ambiguous time ranges.

Use cases

• parse natural language dates like 'tomorrow' or 'next friday' in ruby
• convert user-typed date strings into time objects
• parse phrases like '3 hours ago' or 'next month' into timestamps
• handle flexible date input in scheduling apps
• parse ambiguous date formats with endian precedence control

When to choose

• you need to parse human-written date/time phrases in a Ruby project
• users supply free-form dates like 'next tuesday 5pm' that must be interpreted
• you want a pure Ruby gem with no native dependencies

When to avoid

• you need parsing in a non-Ruby language
• you only need to parse strict machine formats like ISO 8601 (use standard date libraries)
• you need actively developed features or recent bug fixes

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

parser date-time nlp developer-tools web-development ruby cross-platform date-parsing natural-language-dates time-parsing ruby-gem natural-language-processing

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For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="mojombo/chronic")