Teach "approxidate" about weekday syntax

From: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
Date: Nov 17, 2005, 20:36 UTC
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.64.0511171223110.13959@g5.osdl.org>

This allows people to use syntax like "last thursday" for the approxidate.

(Or, indeed, more complex "three thursdays ago", but I suspect that would be pretty unusual).

NOTE! The parsing is strictly sequential, so if you do

	"one day before last thursday"

it will _not_ do what you think it does. It will take the current time, subtract one day, and then go back to the thursday before that. So to get what you want, you'd have to write it the other way around:

	"last thursday and one day before"

which is insane (it's usually the same as "last wednesday" _except_ if today is Thursday, in which case "last wednesday" is yesterday, and "last thursday and one day before" is eight days ago).

Similarly,

	"last thursday one month ago"

will first go back to last thursday, and then go back one month from there, not the other way around.

I doubt anybody would ever use insane dates like that, but I thought I'd point out that the approxidate parsing is not exactly "standard English".

Side note 2: if you want to avoid spaces (because of quoting issues), you can use any non-alphanumberic character instead. So

	git log --since=2.days.ago

works without any quotes.

Signed-off-by: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>
---

diff --git a/date.c b/date.c
index 73c063b..d2a67cc 100644
--- a/date.c
+++ b/date.c
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ static const char *month_names[] = {
 };
 
 static const char *weekday_names[] = {
-	"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"
+	"Sundays", "Mondays", "Tuesdays", "Wednesdays", "Thursdays", "Fridays", "Saturdays"
 };
 
 /*
@@ -531,6 +531,22 @@ static const char *approxidate_alpha(con
 		tl++;
 	}
 
+	for (i = 0; i < 7; i++) {
+		int match = match_string(date, weekday_names[i]);
+		if (match >= 3) {
+			int diff, n = *num -1;
+			*num = 0;
+
+			diff = tm->tm_wday - i;
+			if (diff <= 0)
+				n++;
+			diff += 7*n;
+
+			update_tm(tm, diff * 24 * 60 * 60);
+			return end;
+		}
+	}
+
 	if (match_string(date, "months") >= 5) {
 		int n = tm->tm_mon - *num;
 		*num = 0;