I wrote something like this a few years ago. It's hard to get all the edge cases right, but it works well enough for my purposes. I still use it occasionally as

I wrote something like this a few years ago. It's hard to get all the edge cases right, but it works well enough for my purposes. I still use it occasionally as a format string generator - I paste the format strings into my code rather than doing the natural language parsing thing every time. Here's a demo with source (PHP): http://ramenlabs.com/dbe/ http://ramenlabs.com/dbe/