Dates-LE: Zero Hassle Date Extraction

Pull every date and timestamp out of the current file in one keystroke
Any text file — JSON, YAML, CSV, XML, TOML, Markdown, logs, HTML, JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Go, and the rest

Useful? A star or rating is how other developers find it — ★ GitHub · ★ Open VSX · ★ Marketplace

What it does

Open a file, press Ctrl+Alt+D (Cmd+Alt+D on Mac), and every date in the document lands in a new editor — deduplicate, sort, analyze, convert, filter, or validate it from there. Works in VS Code and in VS Code–based editors like Cursor and VSCodium (installable from Open VSX).

• Log analysis — timestamps from server logs: ISO, syslog, and Apache access-log formats
• Data review — dates and epochs from JSON, YAML, CSV, and XML
• Code audit — date literals and new Date()/Date.parse()/moment()/dayjs()/DateTime.fromISO() arguments in JS/TS, including calls formatted across multiple lines

Install

Use it from an AI agent

The same engine runs as an MCP server, so an agent can call it directly instead of you running a command.

extract_dates(content, format?, filename?, dedupe?, maxResults?)

Returns every date with its notation, epoch value where resolvable, and 1-based line and column, capped at 500 by default with meta.truncated.

The server takes content and returns data — it reads no files and makes no network requests of its own. Published as dates-le-mcp on npm and as io.github.nolindnaidoo/dates-le in the MCP registry.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dates-le": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "dates-le-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

npm install -g dates-le-mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dates-le": { "command": "dates-le-mcp" }
  }
}

echo '{"jsonrpc":"2.0","id":1,"method":"tools/list"}' | npx -y dates-le-mcp

Supported formats

Every document is read. A format only ever adds patterns to the shared ones, so a language ID this does not name — Python, Go, Rust, shell, SQL — is scanned with the shared patterns rather than refused. What it does not get is the format-specific extras: Jan 15 10:30:47 is a date in a log file and three words in a Python one.

Recognized date patterns: ISO 8601 in extended (2024-01-15T10:30:00Z, with optional milliseconds and offset), basic (20240115, 20240115T103045Z), week (2024-W03, 2024-W03-1) and ordinal (2024-015) form; RFC 2822 (Mon, 15 Jan 2024 10:30:00 GMT); Unix epochs in seconds, milliseconds, microseconds and nanoseconds (exactly 10, 13, 16 or 19 digits; everything wider than 10 must also land between 2001-09-09 and 2100, so a request id or a card number is not a date in the 2200s, and digits embedded in longer numbers or in the fraction of a float are never matched at all); UTC strings; US-style M/D/YYYY HH:mm:ss; and bare YYYY-MM-DD. Every occurrence is reported with its real line and column. Values that cannot be resolved to a timestamp are not extracted.

Timezone names are the fixed offsets GMT/UT/UTC/Z, the eight US abbreviations, and CEST, CET, BST, JST, AEST, IST. They are fixed, not zone-aware.

Known limitations: M/D/YYYY assumes US ordering; syslog lines carry no year, so the current year is assumed; IST names three different zones and is read as India's +05:30; a bare 8-digit run is only a date inside 1900–2099, and a 10-digit number in the plausible epoch range cannot be told from a phone number.

The CLI

The same extraction runs from a terminal or a CI step: a Rust CLI in crate/, sharing one corpus with the extension — crate/fixtures/ — so the two can never read a document differently.

dates-le .                          # every date in the tree, as JSON
dates-le --before 2026-01-01 .      # everything already in the past
dates-le --sort --iso config/       # ordered by instant, in readable form
dates-le mcp                        # the same extraction over MCP on stdio

The instant is the point. 2024-01-15, 1705276800 and Mon, 15 Jan 2024 are one moment written three ways, and resolving each to a number is what makes them sortable and comparable rather than three strings to read. Resolution matches Date.parse in V8 exactly — legacy parser included — against 178 cases taken from V8 itself.

A date with no timezone resolves against the machine's, because that is the true answer and it genuinely differs by machine. TZ is honoured.

Commands

Settings