BYTETOOLS

Date Extractor

Find every date in a block of text and normalise it to ISO 8601. Handles ISO, slash, dotted and written formats, and flags ambiguous ones.

What is the Date Extractor?

Date Extractor scans free text for dates and rewrites each one in the unambiguous ISO 8601 form. It recognises ISO dates and timestamps, slash and dotted numeric dates, two-digit years, and written forms such as 12 March 2026 or Mar 12, 2026, reporting the original text and the line it came from alongside the normalised value.

  • Recognises ISO, numeric, dotted and written date formats
  • Normalises every hit to ISO 8601, keeping any time and offset
  • Day-first or month-first reading for ambiguous numeric dates
  • Rejects impossible dates with correct leap-year rules
  • Flags ambiguous and two-digit-year matches for review
  • Export the results with original text, line and offset as CSV

How to use the Date Extractor

  1. 1

    Paste the text you want to scan into the input box.

  2. 2

    Choose whether ambiguous numeric dates should be read day-first or month-first.

  3. 3

    Sort the results in document order or chronologically, and remove duplicates if you want.

  4. 4

    Check any rows flagged ambiguous or low confidence.

  5. 5

    Copy the ISO dates or download the full table as CSV.

About the Date Extractor

Date Extractor scans free text for dates and rewrites each one in the unambiguous ISO 8601 form. It recognises ISO dates and timestamps, slash and dotted numeric dates, two-digit years, and written forms such as 12 March 2026 or Mar 12, 2026, reporting the original text and the line it came from alongside the normalised value.

Numeric dates like 03/04/2026 genuinely are ambiguous, so you choose whether to read them day-first or month-first, and every affected result is flagged rather than quietly guessed. Where only one reading produces a real calendar date the tool swaps the order for you and says so. Impossible dates such as 31 April or 29 February in a non-leap year are rejected outright.

All the matching is done with plain arithmetic in your browser — no date library, no timezone conversion and no upload — so contracts, invoices and email exports stay on your own device. Because nothing is shifted into your local timezone, the results are identical on every machine, and any time or UTC offset written in an ISO timestamp is preserved exactly as you typed it.

Frequently asked questions

How do I extract all the dates from a document?

Paste the text and every recognised date appears in the results table with its ISO form, the line it came from and a confidence flag. You can then copy the ISO list or download everything as CSV.

Is 03/04/2026 the third of April or the fourth of March?

It depends entirely on convention — day-first in most of the world, month-first in the United States. Pick the reading that matches your source, and the tool flags every date where both readings are possible.

How are two-digit years handled?

They use the POSIX pivot: 00 to 68 become 2000s and 69 to 99 become 1900s, so 26 is 2026 and 85 is 1985. These matches are flagged as low confidence because the real century cannot be known.

What happens to invalid dates like 31 February?

They are rejected and never appear in the results. Month lengths and leap years are checked properly, so 29 February 2024 is accepted but 29 February 2026 and 29 February 1900 are not.

Does it convert timezones?

No. Any time and UTC offset found in an ISO timestamp is preserved exactly as written. Nothing is shifted into your local timezone, so results are identical for every user.

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