Date Parser & Cron API: Natural Language to ISO Dates

Use when: a scheduling, calendar, chat or automation agent needs to turn a human date like "next Tuesday 3pm EST", "in 3 days" or "25 Dec" into an exact ISO timestamp in a given time zone, or needs a cron expression explained in plain English with its next run times.

Try this input

{"requests": [{"text": "next Tuesday 3pm EST", "timezone": "America/New_York"}, {"text": "le 3 mars à 14:00", "timezone": "Europe/Paris", "convert_to": "Asia/Tokyo"}, {"cron": "0 9 * * 1-5", "timezone": "UTC", "count": 3}]}

Sample output (real run, 30 Oct 2026, now = 2026-10-30T12:00Z)

{"action": "parse", "text": "next Tuesday 3pm EST", "timezone": "America/New_York", "datetime": "2026-11-03T15:00:00-05:00",
 "date": "2026-11-03", "time": "15:00:00", "weekday": "Tuesday", "utc": "2026-11-03T20:00:00+00:00", "unix": 1793736000,
 "relative_seconds": 374400, "relative_days": 4.33, "iso_week": 45, "now": "2026-10-30T12:00:00+00:00"}
{"action": "cron", "cron": "0 9 * * 1-5", "timezone": "UTC", "description": "At 09:00, Monday through Friday",
 "next_runs": ["2026-11-02T09:00:00+00:00", "2026-11-03T09:00:00+00:00", "2026-11-04T09:00:00+00:00"]}

Each item is either text (a date phrase) or cron (5-field expression), with optional timezone (IANA, default UTC), now (reference time, for repeatable results), convert_to (second time zone), language, date_order (MDY/DMY; US zones default to month-first), find_all (pull every date out of a sentence) and count (cron runs, default 5). Up to 5000 items per run; no API key needed.

Pricing: pay per event, $0.001 per date or cron parse. Rows with errors are not charged.

Limits & failure modes

• Vague phrases ("soon", "later") return an error row (not charged).
• Relative dates depend on the reference time: pass now for repeatable results.
• Some non-English shorthand times are misread, e.g. French "14h" (use "14:00"). Check datetime when parsing other languages.
• Cron is standard 5-field; Quartz seconds, L and # may not be supported.
• No holiday or working-day awareness (use tudorlane/world-holidays-working-days).
• Open-source libraries: dateparser (BSD), croniter (MIT), cron-descriptor (MIT), IANA tz database.

Last tested: 30 Oct 2026.

Use from AI agents (MCP)

• Apify MCP server: add https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=tudorlane/date-parse-cron to Claude, Cursor, ChatGPT, VS Code or any MCP client.
• REST: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/tudorlane~date-parse-cron/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_TOKEN with the input JSON.