ApproximateDateTime is a library that helps determine possible dates and date ranges given a more or less verbose list of criteria describing these dates.

Occasionally dates are not precisely known, but can only be described approximately — resulting in multiple different possibilities of actual occurrence. For example, just knowing the year will result in a date period that covers 365 days (or 366 in leap years), adding a month to the list of clues will narrow this down to the amount of days in the month given, and so on. More enlightening results can be achieved by clue sets including a weekday, or the fact that the moment you describe happened in the afternoon.

Motivation for the implementation arose when trying to plot albums of pictures on a timeline, while for many of them precise information was unavailable.

A user can provide one or multiple clues in order to describe the date(s). Clues can add information by adding to a whitelist of options, to a blacklist of options to avoid, or information on an occurence before or after a certain data point, for any given unit. All of this information can be provided simulatanously and will be prioritized accordingly.

By default, if no year is explicitly whitelisted, the current year will be used.

1. Blacklist
2. Whitelist
3. Plain whitelist data points — surely, multiple can be specified
4. Before — if multiple specified, the earliest is taken, i.e. the biggest time span
5. After — if multiple specified, the latest is taken, i.e. the biggest time span

Install into your project with composer:

[me@localhost your-project]$ composer require wiese/approximate-datetime

There are not an awful lot of dependencies, and they can easily be satisfied by any number of setup flows and infrastructures you may use at your discretion. Yet, this project uses docker to ease creating a level field for development, and composer for dependency management — technologies you should be familiar with prior to submitting changes.

[me@localhost ~]$ git clone [email protected]:wiese/ApproximateDateTime.git
[me@localhost ~]$ cd ApproximateDateTime

[me@localhost ApproximateDateTime]$ docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app composer/composer install

[me@localhost ApproximateDateTime]$ docker build -t wiese/php7.1-approximatedatetime .

[me@localhost ApproximateDateTime]$ docker run -v $(pwd):/app -w /app --rm wiese/php7.1-approximatedatetime ./vendor/bin/phpunit --color=always

# assuming your docker host IP is 172.17.0.1
[me@localhost ApproximateDateTime]$ docker run -v $(pwd):/app -w /app -e XDEBUG_CONFIG="remote_host=172.17.0.1" --rm wiese/php7.1-approximatedatetime ./vendor/bin/phpunit --color=always

[me@localhost ApproximateDateTime]$ docker run -v $(pwd):/app -w /app --rm wiese/php7.1-approximatedatetime ./vendor/bin/phpcs

##Thanks

To Charlie, Great Sun ⊕