The dateString consists of zero or more specifications of the following form:

time

time of day, which is of the form: hh?:mm?:ss?? ?meridian? ?zone? or hhmm ?meridian? ?zone?. If no meridian is specified, hh is interpreted on a 24-hour clock.

date

specific month and day with optional year. The acceptable formats are mm/dd?/yy?, monthname dd ?, yy?, dd monthname ?yy? and day, dd monthname yy. The default year is the current year. If the year is less than 100, we treat the years 00-68 as 2000-2068 and the years 69-99 as 1969-1999. Not all platforms can represent the years 38-70, so an error may result if these years are used.

relative time

specification relative to the current time. The format is number unit acceptable units are year, fortnight, month, week, day, hour, minute (or min), and second (or sec). The unit can be specified as a singular or plural, as in 3 weeks. These modifiers may also be specified: tomorrow, yesterday, today, now, last, this, next, ago.

The actual date is calculated according to the following steps. First, any absolute date and/or time is processed and converted. Using that time as the base, day-of-week specifications are added. Next, relative specifications are used. If a date or day is specified, and no absolute or relative time is given, midnight is used. Finally, a correction is applied so that the correct hour of the day is produced after allowing for daylight savings time differences and the correct date is given when going from the end of a long month to a short month.

Examples

3/2/2004 2 PM and 3/2/2004 3 PM
3/2/2004 14:00 and 3/2/2004 15:00
2 March 2004 14:00 and 2 March 2004 15:00
2 March 2004 2 PM and 2 March 2004 3 PM

2 PM and now

last month and now

last week and now

1 March and 30 April
1 March 2004 and 30 April 2004

30 days ago and now