DateStringParser Class

Functions:

nltotime($string, $format = NULL) - pass in any form of string, and $format according to PHP Date (http://php.net/manual/en/function.date.php)

nlp_filtered_string() - returns string after nltotime was called, removes parsable words. See example.

time_ago($string, $granularity = 2) - pass in any date format into $string, will automatically parse it. Granularity determines how much information will be displayed.

Examples and Use Cases:

1) Include the class, and create the object

include_once('DateStringParser.inc.php');
$parser = new DateStringParser();

2) Natural Language Parsing

// outputs "2012-01-06"
echo $parser->nltotime("tomorrow i am going to grab lunch", "Y-m-d");

// outputs "i am going to grab lunch"
echo $parser->nlp_filtered_string();

3) Time Ago

// outputs "one year, 4 days, 59 minutes ago"
echo $parser->time_ago("2011-1-2 03:00:00", 3);

// outputs "one year ago"
echo $parser->time_ago("2011-1-2 03:00:00", 1);

Customization and Multi-language Support

lines 56 ~ 88 in the class

private $time_ago = 'ago';

private $time_ago_format = array(
    'seconds' => array(
        'singular' => 'one second',
        'plural' => '%d seconds'
        ),
    'minutes' => array(
        'singular' => 'one minute',
        'plural' => '%d minutes'
        ),
    'hours' => array(
        'singular' => 'one hour',
        'plural' => '%d hours'
        ),
    'days' => array(
        'singular' => 'one day',
        'plural' => '%d days'
        ),
    'weeks' => array(
        'singular' => 'one week',
        'plural' => '%d weeks'
        ),
    'months' => array(
        'singular' => 'one month',
        'plural' => '%d months'
        ),
    'years' => array(
        'singular' => 'one year',
        'plural' => '%d years'
        )
);

The word formatting for time ago can be customized here, depending on how you like it. You can enter different languages, as well as change wordings.