Dates LE

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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

Where	What you get	Install
VS Code	The extraction, in your editor, on a keystroke	Marketplace
Cursor, VSCodium, Windsurf	The same extension	Open VSX
A terminal or a CI step	The same run over a whole tree, with exit codes	cargo install dates-le · crates.io
Any MCP agent, via Node	extract_dates over stdio	npx dates-le-mcp · npm
Zed	The MCP server as a context server	zed-industries/extensions#7079 (pending review)

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.

Editor	How
VS Code 1.101+	Nothing to install — the extension registers extract_dates with agent mode
Zed	Dates-LE — pending review
Claude Code	claude mcp add dates-le -- npx -y dates-le-mcp
Cursor, Windsurf, anything else	point it at npx dates-le-mcp

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.

Most hosts read a JSON config. Add one entry:

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

-y skips the install prompt on first run. Pin a version if you would rather not track releases — dates-le-mcp@2.3.1.

Prefer not to go through npx on every launch? Install it once and point at the binary instead:

npm install -g dates-le-mcp

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

It speaks MCP over stdio and needs no environment variables, no API key and no configuration of its own. To check it before wiring it into anything:

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

That prints the tool list and exits — if you see extract_dates, the server works.

Supported formats

Format	Language IDs	What gets extracted
JSON	json	Every recognized date pattern in the content
YAML	yaml, yml	Every recognized date pattern in the content
CSV	csv	Every recognized date pattern, cell by cell
XML	xml	Date patterns outside comments (inline and multiline comments are skipped)
Log / plain text	log, plaintext	Everything above plus YYYY-MM-DD HH:mm:ss log lines, syslog (Mon DD HH:mm:ss), and Apache access-log timestamps
JavaScript / TypeScript	javascript, javascriptreact, typescript, typescriptreact	Everything above plus string arguments to new Date(), Date.parse(), moment(), dayjs(), DateTime.fromISO()
HTML	html	Everything above plus datetime attributes, date-bearing <meta> tags, and JSON-LD datePublished/dateModified
TOML / Markdown	toml, markdown, md	Every recognized date pattern in the content
INI / properties	ini, cfg, conf, properties	Every recognized date pattern in the content
Anything else	every other language ID	Every recognized date pattern in the content

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

Command	Description
Dates-LE: Extract Dates (Ctrl+Alt+D / Cmd+Alt+D)	Extract all dates from the active document
Dates-LE: Analyze Dates	Statistics, patterns, clusters, gaps, and anomalies
Dates-LE: Convert Dates	Convert extracted dates to ISO, RFC 2822, Unix, UTC, local, simple, or a custom format
Dates-LE: Filter Dates	Filter by range, format, duplicates, future/past
Dates-LE: Validate Dates	Check extracted dates against selectable rules
Dates-LE: Deduplicate Dates	Remove duplicate lines from the results
Dates-LE: Sort Dates	Sort results chronologically or alphabetically
Dates-LE: Open Settings	Open Dates-LE settings
Dates-LE: Help	Built-in documentation

Settings

Setting	Default	Description
dates-le.openResultsSideBySide	true	Open results beside the current editor
dates-le.copyToClipboardEnabled	false	Also copy results to the clipboard
dates-le.notificationsLevel	silent	all = every notification, important = warnings + errors, silent = errors only
dates-le.safety.enabled	true	Guardrails for very large files
dates-le.safety.fileSizeWarnBytes	1000000	Refuse extraction above this file size
dates-le.statusBar.enabled	true	Show the status bar item
dates-le.telemetryEnabled	false	Local-only event log (see Privacy)

Languages

Twelve languages besides English:

German · Spanish · French · Indonesian · Italian · Japanese · Korean · Portuguese (Brazil) · Russian · Ukrainian · Vietnamese · Chinese (Simplified)

Both halves are covered — the manifest (command titles, setting names and descriptions) and everything shown while the extension runs (notifications, the status bar, quick-picks and prompts). The extension follows VS Code's display language, so it matches whatever the editor is already set to; no setting of its own.

Privacy & security

• No network access. The extension never sends data anywhere. The telemetryEnabled setting only writes events to a local Output Channel you can inspect (Dates-LE Telemetry).
• The MCP server holds the same line. It takes content as an argument and returns data: no filesystem access, no network calls, no telemetry. Your agent already has file-read tools, so duplicating them inside the server would add a path-traversal surface for no capability. check:mcp-bundle fails the build if the server ever imports something that could reach either.
• Error notifications redact home directories and credential-shaped fragments.

Documentation

What	Where
What the tool is allowed to say — scope, output contract, refusals, non-goals	crate/SPEC.md
How the extension is built and held together — architecture, invariants, toolchain, release	AGENTS.md
How the CLI is built and held together	crate/AGENTS.md
What changed	CHANGELOG.md · crate/CHANGELOG.md
The tool's page, and the other fifteen	letools.dev/tools/dates-le

Performance

Input	Size	Found	Time	Rate	Scan speed
Server log (ISO)	1.74 MB	40,000	139.92 ms	285,887/sec	12.5 MB/s
JSON records	1.42 MB	25,000	82.75 ms	302,132/sec	17.2 MB/s
CSV export	0.64 MB	40,000	39.15 ms	1,021,610/sec	16.3 MB/s

Median of 7 runs after warmup, on Apple M5 Pro, 24 GB RAM, Node 24.3.0. Inputs are generated by scripts/benchmark.ts rather than checked in, so the sizes above are exactly what was measured. Reproduce with bun run benchmark.

These are machine-specific and are not asserted in CI — a benchmark that gates a build only tells you how busy the runner was.

Testing

Metric	Coverage
Statements	91.69%
Branches	81.39%
Functions	96.32%
Lines	92.97%

228 test cases across 19 files, plus an integration suite that runs in a real VS Code extension host and an end-to-end test that installs the built .vsix into a clean profile.

Generated from a real run — coverage/coverage-summary.json and coverage/test-results.json — by scripts/coverage-readme.js; CI fails if this section drifts. Reproduce with bun run test:coverage, and the case count is the one vitest prints.

More from the LE family

Sixteen single-purpose tools for the work in front of every model. Each ships a Rust CLI and an MCP server. One page: letools.dev

Get it out

• String-LE — Extract every string in a codebase, with its position, so a person can read them
• Numbers-LE — Extract every hardcoded number in a codebase, so a person can check them
• Units-LE — Extract every quantity with its unit, normalized, and refuse the ambiguous ones by name
• Dates-LE — Extract every date and timestamp, and the exact instant each one resolves to
• IDs-LE — Extract every UUID, ULID, NanoID, ObjectId and Snowflake, and decode the time inside
• IPs-LE — Extract every IP address, CIDR block and MAC, normalized and classified by scope
• URLs-LE — Extract every URL in a codebase, with its protocol and exact position
• Paths-LE — Extract every file path in a codebase, and say whether it still points at anything
• Colors-LE — Extract every color in a codebase, and say which ones are not in your palette

Check it

• Regex-LE — Find every regex in a codebase, and report which can be driven into catastrophic backtracking
• Versions-LE — Find where one dependency is constrained differently across a repository's manifests
• i18n-LE — Identify the i18n library a project uses, then audit its catalogs by that library's rules
• Scrape-LE — Check whether a page is scrapeable before the scraper is written, and say when it cannot tell

Guard it

• Secrets-LE — Find hardcoded credentials in a codebase, and never print one into the report
• EnvSync-LE — Compare the dotenv files in a tree, and say which keys are missing from which
• Unicode-LE — Find the Unicode that hides meaning — bidi controls, invisibles, homoglyphs, mixed scripts

Each stands on its own: no shared crate, no published core. Where two of them agree, it is because the same answer was right twice.

Contact — nolindnaidoo.com · GitHub · LinkedIn

Also by nolindnaidoo

Rust — pixelcoords and pixelactions are one loop: pixelcoords answers where, pixelactions acts there. Their own tools, their own voice — not part of the LE family.

• pixelcoords — Freeze your screen, mark regions, get pixel-exact coordinates and crops pixelcoords.dev · crates.io · docs.rs
• pixelactions — Consume human-verified coordinates, perform the interaction, confirm it landed pixelactions.dev · crates.io · docs.rs

License

MIT © nolindnaidoo