David,
You have a hard problem to solve here.
"In 814 Charlemagne died"
-> Eight fourteen
"In the year of our lord 814 ..."
-> Eight hundred and fourteen
"In 814 cases out of 1000 the patient recovered"
-> Eight hundred and fourteen
Oh, it can never be perfect, that's for sure. My initial thought was to
use a range from 1000 to 2999 (as that would be a trivial regex), which
lets you go back as far as the Battle of Hastings, and forward nearly a
thousand years. It's still ambiguous, of course, but hopefully people
would use commas in four-digit numbers that aren't supposed to be years.
And, taking Daniel's suggestion makes it better, in that you can just
turn off years if you don't want that sort of expansion. But something
like "in 1994 there were 1994 reported cases" is always going to fail.
Nothing to do but try to make that prominent in the documentation.
-- Buddy
