Support parsing human-friendly deltas?

[Ravencentric]

I have a couple places where I need to parse durations like 2h30m, 7d, 2h 30min, etc.

For some prior art, jiff supports this for its Span and SignedDuration types:

• https://docs.rs/jiff/latest/jiff/struct.Span.html#parsing-and-printing
• https://docs.rs/jiff/latest/jiff/struct.SignedDuration.html#parsing-and-printing

[ariebovenberg]

Hi, thanks for posting. I'm definitely considering this. My only concern at the moment is that this complicates the parse_iso family of methods. Since '30min' is definitely not ISO, would a separate method be needed? Or just support non-ISO in deltas parse_iso? Neither is particularly appealing. Perhaps a better option will present itself.

[Ravencentric]

I personally would prefer a seperate method, say TimeDelta.parse_friendly("2h 30m") so that I can opt-in to more lenient parsing and still have the choice of rejecting non-iso formats by using parse_iso. Alternatively, a more generic method, say from_str(iso_or_friendly) (like FromStr from Rust) or just parse(iso_or_friendly) but the former naming feels a bit out of place because there are no other from_* methods in whenever and the latter might be too generic.

[ariebovenberg]

The parse_friendly makes most sense to me too. I'm moving this to discussions until there is a consensus