Is there a way to parse a relative date using Moment.js?

Question

Moment.js is a very usefull JavaScript library which provides many functions to manipulate date formatting.

In order to create a Moment object, it is possible to parse a string simply moment("1995-12-25"); or by providing format moment("12-25-1995", "MM-DD-YYYY");.

Another feature allows us to use relative dates : moment("1995-12-25").fromNow() // 19 years ago.

However, I can not find a way to parse such a relative date. When I try moment("19 years ago") it just returns Invalid date, and it does not exist any token to properly format the date.

Is there an easy way to do this? Or is it a missing feature that should be suggested on Github?

Answer 1

Just found chrono wile looking to see if NLP had already been implemented in momentjs. It looks like it handles parsing NLP to a date, which can be used to create a momentjs date.

Simply pass a string to function chrono.parseDate or chrono.parse.

> var chrono = require('chrono-node')

> chrono.parseDate('An appointment on Sep 12-13') 
Fri Sep 12 2014 12:00:00 GMT-0500 (CDT)

And a quick example showing how that would work

Code

const moment = require('moment')
const chrono = require('chrono-node')

let now = moment()
console.log(now)
let yrsAgo = chrono.parseDate("19 years ago")
console.log(yrsAgo)
let yrsAgoMoment = moment(yrsAgo)
console.log(yrsAgoMoment)

Output

$node test.js
moment("2017-06-30T08:29:20.938")
1998-06-30T17:00:00.000Z
moment("1998-06-30T12:00:00.000")