So, I haven’t blogged in a long time. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the main one is that I’ve found a project.

I recently was invited to join the Moment.js core collaborators team. How this happened is a weird accident of networking. At CodeMash in January I was told I had to meet Matt Johnson. It turns out that Matt and I have both:

1. Given conference talks on RavenDB
2. Developed a time and attendance solution

This is a a very weird set of things to have in common with someone. If there is a third person in the world who has done these two things, let Matt and I know – we would like to be your friend.

Anyways, Matt is on the Moment.js team, and he decided that I should take what I know about date and time and come help out, so here I am.

Over the past month I have had a huge amount of fun working on the project. At this point I mostly write documentation and answer people’s questions on GitHub, but I have snuck a couple pull requests in :-).

On the subject of fun, it is a little known fact that as of 2.11.0 Moment.js supports Klingon as a locale, thanks to some wonderful nerds on the internet.

I felt compelled to make something out of this, so this past weekend I set out to change all the dates in your browser to Klingon via chrome extension.

As it turns out, chrome extensions are crazy easy to make. In order to support Klingon-ing of all dates, I simply queried the DOM with some regular expressions that would match a lot of common English date formats, and then fed them into a function. All of the code relevant to Moment.js is right here:

    function toKlingon (match) {
        //parse the string using the format that the Regular expression is looking for
        var a = moment(match, format);
        //change to the klingon locale and return formated as local long date
        return a.locale('tlh').format('LL');
    }

Rest assured that the DOM parsing involved was substantially more difficult than this.

This is a great example of just how well Moment.js does i18n. I don’t need to know anything about this language to be able to output dates formatted exactly as native speakers would.

The extension does have an issue where it will always display all date parts, even if they weren’t parsed. For example, dates from Gmail, which are written as “Mar 13” are output with a year.

I am working on a minor change to Moment that will expose what date parts were actually parsed, which would allow me to easily include only valid data in this situation.

I also need to do some more work on better/faster DOM parsing with the regular expressions, as it still doesn’t get quite every date, but generally the extension works. If you would like to try it, find it in the chrome store here.

• Moment.js