Shortcuts natural language date parsing?

Shortcuts
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1

I am looking for date parsing in shortcuts.
String in, date out.
Has anyone done this yet?

I want to parse strings like
“10d before last Friday of April”

I don’t mind the syntax, only the expressivity. So something like this would be perfectly fine

addDaysTo(dayOfMonth(nextMonth("April"), "last Friday"),-10)

Or maybe as json which is more parsing friendly in shortcuts

{"type": "operation",
 "operation": "add",
 "date": {
    "type": "operation",
    "operation": "dayOf",
    "qualifier": "last friday",
    "dateRange": {
       "type": "operation",
       "operation": "next",
       "direction": "forward",
       "value": "April"},
 "difference": {"type": "days", "value": -10}}

Would need to rethink that type system though :wink:

2

I don’t use Shortcuts a lot, but I was impressed to discover a while ago that the Get Dates From Text action does a lot of this kind of thing out of the box. It may take a little fiddling to get the right approach, however. (Exits: typos)

See this thread from a little while back: Time Based Shortcut

3

Thank you for the pointers!

Shortcuts natural language syntax is described here and is ok, but does not support date math.

The toolbox pro action does a bit more but still less than what I am used to of Things’s in-app natural language syntax. Hmmmm.

Still good to look at some examples!

So still searching … Maybe I just start a simple shortcut for date parsing and see if I can frame my needs simple enough so that I get it working.