Re: Inputting relative datetimes

Greetings,

On Thursday, August 25, 2011 05:39:09 AM Dean Rasheed wrote:
> As background, I have an app that accepts user text input and casts it
> to a timestamp in order to produce reports. I use PostgreSQL's
> timestamp input conversion for this, since it gives a lot of
> flexibility, and can parse pretty much anything the users throw at it.
>
> It is also handy that it recognizes special case values like "now",
> "today", "tomorrow" and "yesterday". However, I can't see any way of
> entering more general relative timestamps like "5 days ago" or "2
> hours from now".
>

Years ago I wrapped 'getdate.y' from the CVS source code and made it into a
python extension. It handles "+2 hours" or "next week", etc. I don't know much
of anything about making pg contrib modules, but it should not be hard to do.
The way it works is you pass in a string and it returns the unix timestamp.

[...snipped...]
>
> Thoughts?
> Better ideas?
>
> Regards,
> Dean

Regards,
J