Dickie dates

dickie-dates implies controlling knowingly imprecise epochs

An implementation of a simple set of conventions for handling intentionally ambiguous date-time stamps.

Installation

npm install dickie-dates

Usage

The 1980s can be represented by the string "198".

var dickiedates = require("dickie-dates")
console.log(dickiedates.parseDate("198"))

This will return:

{ startDate: '19800101000000',
  endDate: '19891231235959',
  precision: 2 }

The precision index allows for continued recognition of the originally ambiguous input.

Documentation

There's not a lot of detailed documentation at the moment, but for what it's worth you can follow the thinking that went into this package in the following blog posts:

• "Awkward dates", 20th June 2016
• "Allowing date uncertainty", 27th June 2016
• "Playpool chart", 4th July 2016, in which you can see the approach being used
• "Ancient dates", 17th October 2016