Formatting duration options

[kossnocorp]

@ckcherry23 is working on a duration improvements proposal, and one of the ideas she had is to add the ability to format duration using format string. I.e.:

10y 2m
23:08.456
About 8 hours

While I can't see clearly how it would work, given the duration has variable units, I think it's worth considering. One of the alternatives is to have a predefined set of formats like short, time, distance, etc.

Please share your feedback here.

[ckcherry23]

Depending on how format duration is implemented (or improved), we could also add the ability to parse strings to return a Duration.

For example,

var result = parseDuration(durationString: "2 days 3 hours")
//=> { days: 2, hours: 3 }

var result = parseDuration(durationString: "10y 2m", formatString: "y'y' M'm'")
//=> { years: 10, months: 2 }

[kossnocorp]

I see, but what about if the duration is { days: 5374 }? Do you expect to normalize it into those units (y and m)?

[ckcherry23]

I think we can take another argument options to let the user specify if they want normalization or not.

var result = parseDuration(durationString: string, formatString: string, options: ParseDurationOptions)

interface ParseDurationOptions {
  normalize?: boolean;
  //...
}

I think no normalization must be the default.