This package converts semantic date strings into Moment data object. Note that this package will interpret numbered dates the American way -- Month/Day -- as opposed to the Rest-of-the-World way -- Day/Month.
Check out the demo!
Add to your Meteor project
meteor add ccorcos:date-parser
Then simply pass your string into parseDate. If the result is a moment object, then you're good. If it failed to parse, it will come out as undefined.
All I'm doing is combinatorically combining differnt ways of specifying dates and inferring certain meanings when information is left out. For example, "Jan 4" will call autoYear and autoTime. autoYear will pick the next upcoming year with that date, not necessarily the current year. autoTime will pick noon.
I'm also cleaning and tokenizing the strings to remove undesired characers like / and .. I simply replace these with spaces and then clean everything up so all the tokens are space-separated. Then I simply parse the data with a ton of different Moment.js strict formats. You can see all of then in parseDate.patterns.