Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

Really cool project, but I may have found a mistake. Typing "21st night september" returns “At 12:00 AM, on day 21 of the month, only in September”. And I would expect it to be maybe 9-11:59pm, not midnight that morning. But maybe 'night' is just not very well defined?

Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

#6

Post by gfaster » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:27 PM UTC

This is pretty great. It would be nice if it were able to handle exceptions, for example:

"The second Sunday of every month except in December"

Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

#7

Post by Chico75 » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:36 PM UTC

This is incredible. While there is still a decent rate of false-positives or errors, it's such a nicer user interface than the powerful yet hard-to-read cron syntax.

Any chance it could be made into a library/api?

Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

#8

Post by taude » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:37 PM UTC

A different take on the same idea: Cron tab Guru [1]. I use this tool all the time.

I'd love a CLI version of this tool, where I pass in the cron expression and it tells me the english translation.

[1] https://crontab.guru/

Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

#9

Post by jacobpedd » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:41 PM UTC

taude wrote: post #8

A different take on the same idea: Cron tab Guru [1]. I use this tool all the time. I'd love a CLI version of this tool, where I pass in the cron expression and it tells me the english translation. [1] https://crontab.guru/

Cron tab guru was the inspiration! Was curious if a plain english version was possible.

Check out Cronstrue[1], its what I use for going from cron expression to english.

[1] https://github.com/bradymholt/cRonstrue

Re: Show HN: Convert English to Cron Expressions

#10

Post by jacobpedd » Fri, Aug 05, 2022, 5:43 PM UTC

gfaster wrote: post #6

This is pretty great. It would be nice if it were able to handle exceptions, for example: "The second Sunday of every month except in December"

I added your example to the training data and it seems like it helped it learn exceptions. Here's the result for your prompt:

0 0 8-14 1-4,6-12 *