Datehelps

Datehelps is a software project and knowledge resource focused on date and time processing. It provides a suite of tools, libraries, and documentation designed to help developers handle dates, times, time zones, and related calculations consistently across platforms.

Key features include flexible date parsing that accepts multiple input formats (ISO 8601, RFCs, and common human-friendly strings) and yields a standardized internal representation. It offers time zone support with conversions between IANA time zones and UTC, as well as duration and interval arithmetic with correct handling of month lengths, leap years, and daylight saving transitions. Locale-aware formatting and relative time expressions enable human-readable outputs, and calendrical utilities support weekday calculations, week-based operations, and holiday-aware computations.

Design and scope: datehelps is typically modular, with a core date model and language-specific adapters. It is designed to be platform-agnostic and is implemented in several languages by separate teams, encouraging interoperability through common data representations.

History: datehelps emerged as an open-source initiative in the early 2020s to address inconsistencies in date handling across projects. It has since accumulated documentation, tutorials, and a growing set of contributors.

Licensing and availability: the project is distributed under a permissive license and maintained in open repositories with tests, issue trackers, and community guidelines.

Reception: developers cite improved consistency and reduced edge-case bugs, while critiques point to the complexity of the library surface and performance considerations in large applications. See also: comparisons with other date libraries.