This repo is my response to the following technical challenge. See the short report I produce to explain my choice.

Natural Language Hours Parsing

The goal of this challenge is to create a parser that can read store opening hours written by a human and produce a machine-readable canonical (structured) representation.

For example:

var hours = require('kites-challenge-1')
var input = 'Sun.-Thur. 11:00-23:00, Friday-Sat. 1100-0000'
var output = hours.parse(input)
console.log(output)  // S0-4:1100-2300;5-6:1100-2400

Please also read the FAQ.

The Output Format

The first thing you should do is read test/index.js. It is the canonical reference. As long as your parser correctly implements the reference tests, it is considered a correct solution.

Some English notes:

There is only one correct output for a given input string.
The parser deals with input hours overlaps.
A day begins at 0000 and ends at 2800.

Usage

Instructions

Clone this repository to your development machine. You may put your solution in your own Github public repository as long as it is not easily discoverable from kites/kites-challenge-1.
Run npm install
Implement hours.parse in lib/index.js
Ensure all tests pass in node via npm test
Ensure all tests pass in phantomjs and all browsers
When finished, email us your code for review OR send us a link to the public repository you used (preferred).

Hints

Before starting, study the input grammar in test/index.js very carefully.
We deliberately excluded some edge cases to make your implementation easier. You do not need to implement a full-blown solution that will parse every possible way of writing store opening hours; just the ones listed in the test file.
After writing a correct implementation in English, dealing with Chinese input should be relatively trivial.
At Kites, we use zuul and SauceLabs to do our browser testing. SauceLabs includes nice free testing support for public repositories.

Scoring

To pass, you must provide supporting proof or very clear instructions for how to build and verify your solution passes tests in node, phantomjs, and all browsers. If your solution fails for any subset of platforms or platform versions (e.g. passes every Firefox except Firefox 24.0), you must document the failure and explain why.