How does Apple find dates, times and addresses in emails?

Question

In the iOS email client, when an email contains a date, time or location, the text becomes a hyperlink and it is possible to create an appointment or look at a map simply by

Answer 1

I once wrote a parser to do this, using pyparsing. It's really very simple, you just need to get all the different ways right, but there aren't that many. It only took a few hours and was pretty fast.