dateparser 0.3.0

Date parsing library designed to parse dates from HTML pages

dateparser provides modules to easily parse localized dates in almost any string formats commonly found on web pages.

Documentation

Documentation can be found here.

Features

• Generic parsing of dates in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and several other languages and formats.

• Generic parsing of relative dates like: '1 min ago', '2 weeks ago', '3 months, 1 week and 1 day ago'.

• Generic parsing of dates with time zones abbreviations or UTC offsets like: 'August 14, 2015 EST', 'July 4, 2013 PST', '21 July 2013 10:15 pm +0500'.

• Extensive test coverage.

Usage

The most straightforward way is to use the dateparser.parse function, that wraps around most of the functionality in the module.

Popular Formats

>>> import dateparser
>>> dateparser.parse('12/12/12')
datetime.datetime(2012, 12, 12, 0, 0)
>>> dateparser.parse(u'Fri, 12 Dec 2014 10:55:50')
datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 12, 10, 55, 50)
>>> dateparser.parse(u'Martes 21 de Octubre de 2014')  # Spanish (Tuesday 21 October 2014)
datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 21, 0, 0)
>>> dateparser.parse(u'Le 11 Décembre 2014 à 09:00')  # French (11 December 2014 at 09:00)
datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 11, 9, 0)
>>> dateparser.parse(u'13 января 2015 г. в 13:34')  # Russian (13 January 2015 at 13:34)
datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 13, 13, 34)
>>> dateparser.parse(u'1 เดือนตุลาคม 2005, 1:00 AM')  # Thai (1 October 2005, 1:00 AM)
datetime.datetime(2005, 10, 1, 1, 0)

This will try to parse a date from the given string, attempting to detect the language each time.

You can specify the language(s), if known, using languages argument. In this case, given languages are used and language detection is skipped:

>>> dateparser.parse('2015, Ago 15, 1:08 pm', languages=['pt', 'es'])
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 15, 13, 8)

If you know the possible formats of the dates, you can use the date_formats argument:

>>> dateparser.parse(u'22 Décembre 2010', date_formats=['%d %B %Y'])
datetime.datetime(2010, 12, 22, 0, 0)

Relative Dates

>>> parse('1 hour ago')
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 23, 0)
>>> parse(u'Il ya 2 heures')  # French (2 hours ago)
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 22, 0)
>>> parse(u'1 anno 2 mesi')  # Italian (1 year 2 months)
datetime.datetime(2014, 4, 1, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'yaklaşık 23 saat önce')  # Turkish (23 hours ago)
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 1, 0)
>>> parse(u'Hace una semana')  # Spanish (a week ago)
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 25, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'2小时前')  # Chinese (2 hours ago)
datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 22, 0)

Note

Testing above code might return different values for you depending on your environment’s current date and time.

Dependencies

dateparser translates non-English dates to English and uses dateutil module parser to parse the translated date.

Also, it requires PyYAML for its language detection module to work.

Limitations

• Limited language support.

History

0.3.0 (2015-07-29)

New features:

• Compatibility with Python 3 and PyPy.

Improvements:

• languages.yaml data cleaned up to make it human-readable.

• Improved Spanish date parsing.

0.2.1 (2015-07-13)

• Support for generic parsing of dates with UTC offset.

• Support for Filipino dates.

• Improved support for French and Spanish dates.

0.2.0 (2015-06-17)

• Easy to use parse function

• Languages definitions using YAML.

• Using translation based approach for parsing non-english languages. Previously, dateutil.parserinfo was used for language definitions.

• Better period extraction.

• Improved tests.

• Added a number of new simplifications for more comprehensive generic parsing.

• Improved validation for dates.

• Support for Polish, Thai and Arabic dates.

• Support for pytz timezones.

• Fixed building and packaging issues.

0.1.0 (2014-11-24)

• First release on PyPI.