dateparser 0.6.0

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 is built automatically and can be found on Read the Docs.

Features

• Generic parsing of dates in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and over 20 other languages plus numerous formats in a language agnostic fashion.

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

• 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'.

• Support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. See Supported Calendars.

• 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.

Note

Support for relative dates in future needs a lot of improvement, we look forward to community’s contribution to get better on that part. See Contributing.

OOTB Language Based Date Order Preference

>>> # parsing ambiguous date
>>> parse('02-03-2016')  # assumes english language, uses MDY date order
datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 2, 0, 0)
>>> parse('le 02-03-2016')  # detects french, uses DMY date order
datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 2, 0, 0)

Note

Ordering is not locale based, that’s why do not expect DMY order for UK/Australia English. You can specify date order in that case as follows usings Settings:

>>> parse('18-12-15 06:00', settings={'DATE_ORDER': 'DMY'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 18, 6, 0)

For more on date order, please look at Settings.

Timezone and UTC Offset

By default, dateparser returns tzaware datetime if timezone is present in date string. Otherwise, it returns a naive datetime object.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM EST')
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>)

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM -0500')
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC\-05:00'>)

>>> parse('2 hours ago EST')
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 15, 55, 39, 579667, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>)

>>> parse('2 hours ago -0500')
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 15, 59, 30, 193431, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC\-05:00'>)

If date has no timezone name/abbreviation or offset, you can specify it using TIMEZONE setting.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'US/Eastern'})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0)

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': '+0500'})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0)

TIMEZONE option may not be useful alone as it only attaches given timezone to resultant datetime object. But can be useful in cases where you want conversions from and to different timezones or when simply want a tzaware date with given timezone info attached.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'US/Eastern', 'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' EST-1 day, 19:00:00 STD>)

>>> parse('10:00 am', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'EST', 'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'})
datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 25, 11, 0)

Some more use cases for conversion of timezones.

>>> parse('10:00 am EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'})  # date string has timezone info
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 11, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EDT'>)

>>> parse('now EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})  # relative dates
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 24, 47, 371823, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

In case, no timezone is present in date string or defined in settings. You can still return tzaware datetime. It is especially useful in case of relative dates when uncertain what timezone is relative base.

>>> parse('2 minutes ago', settings={'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 11, 4, 25, 24, 152670, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Asia/Karachi' PKT+5:00:00 STD>)

In case, you want to compute relative dates in UTC instead of default system’s local timezone, you can use TIMEZONE setting.

>>> parse('4 minutes ago', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 27, 59, 647248, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

Note

In case, when timezone is present both in string and also specified using settings, string is parsed into tzaware representation and then converted to timezone specified in settings.

>>> parse('10:40 pm PKT', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 17, 40, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

>>> parse('20 mins ago EST', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 21, 16, 0, 885091, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

For more on timezones, please look at Settings.

Incomplete Dates

>>> from dateparser import parse
>>> parse(u'December 2015')  # default behavior
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 16, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'last'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 31, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'first'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 1, 0, 0)

>>> parse(u'March')
datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 16, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'March', settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': 'future'})
datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 16, 0, 0)
>>> # parsing with preference set for 'past'
>>> parse('August', settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': 'past'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 15, 0, 0)

You can also ignore parsing incomplete dates altogether by setting STRICT_PARSING flag as follows:

>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'STRICT_PARSING': True})
None

For more on handling incomplete dates, please look at Settings.

Dependencies

dateparser relies on following libraries in some ways:

• dateutil’s module relativedelta for its freshness parser.

• ruamel.yaml for reading language and configuration files.

• jdatetime to convert Jalali dates to Gregorian.

• umalqurra to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian.

• tzlocal to reliably get local timezone.

Supported languages

• Arabic

• Bangla

• Belarusian

• Bulgarian

• Chinese

• Czech

• Danish

• Dutch

• English

• Filipino/Tagalog

• Finnish

• French

• Hebrew

• Hindi

• Hungarian

• German

• Indonesian

• Italian

• Japanese

• Persian

• Polish

• Portuguese

• Romanian

• Russian

• Spanish

• Thai

• Turkish

• Ukrainian

• Vietnamese

Supported Calendars

• Gregorian calendar.

• Persian Jalali calendar. For more information, refer to Persian Jalali Calendar.

• Hijri/Islamic Calendar. For more information, refer to Hijri Calendar.

  >>> from dateparser.calendars.jalali import JalaliCalendar
  >>> JalaliCalendar(u'جمعه سی ام اسفند ۱۳۸۷').get_date()
  {'date_obj': datetime.datetime(2009, 3, 20, 0, 0), 'period': 'day'}
  

  >>> from dateparser.calendars.hijri import HijriCalendar
  >>> HijriCalendar(u'17-01-1437 هـ 08:30 مساءً').get_date()
  {'date_obj': datetime.datetime(2015, 10, 30, 20, 30), 'period': 'day'}
  

Note

HijriCalendar has some limitations with Python 3.

Note

For Finnish language, please specify settings={‘SKIP_TOKENS’: []} to correctly parse freshness dates.

Install using following command to use calendars.

Tip

pip install dateparser[calendars]

History

0.6.0 (2017-03-13)

New features: * Consistent parsing in terms of true python representation of date string. See #281 * Added support for Bangla, Bulgarian and Hindi languages.

Improvements:

• Major bug fixes related to parser and system’s locale. See #277, #282

• Type check for timezone arguments in settings. see #267

• Pinned dependencies’ versions in requirements. See #265

• Improved support for cn, es, dutch languages. See #274, #272, #285

Packaging: * Make calendars extras to be used at the time of installation if need to use calendars feature.

0.5.1 (2016-12-18)

New features:

• Added support for Hebrew

Improvements:

• Safer loading of YAML. See #251

• Better timezone parsing for freshness dates. See #256

• Pinned dependencies’ versions in requirements. See #265

• Improved support for zh, fi languages. See #249, #250, #248, #244

0.5.0 (2016-09-26)

New features:

• DateDataParser now also returns detected language in the result dictionary.

• Explicit and lucid timezone conversion for a given datestring using TIMEZONE, TO_TIMEZONE settings.

• Added Hungarian langauge.

• Added setting, STRICT_PARSING to ignore imcomplete dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed quite a few parser bugs reported in issues #219, #222, #207, #224.

• Improved support for chinese language.

• Consistent interface for both Jalali and Hijri parsers.

0.4.0 (2016-06-17)

New features:

• Support for Language based date order preference while parsing ambiguous dates.

• Support for parsing dates with no spaces in between components.

• Support for custom date order preference using settings.

• Support for parsing generic relative dates in future.e.g. tomorrow, in two weeks, etc.

• Added RELATIVE_BASE settings to set date context to any datetime in past or future.

• Replaced dateutil.parser.parse with dateparser’s own parser.

Improvements:

• Added simplifications for 12 noon and 12 midnight.

• Fixed several bugs

• Replaced PyYAML library by its active fork ruamel.yaml which also fixed the issues with installation on windows using python35.

• More predictable date_formats handling.

0.3.5 (2016-04-27)

New features:

• Danish language support.

• Japanese language support.

• Support for parsing date strings with accents.

Improvements:

• Transformed languages.yaml into base file and separate files for each language.

• Fixed vietnamese language simplifications.

• No more version restrictions for python-dateutil.

• Timezone parsing improvements.

• Fixed test environments.

• Cleaned language codes. Now we strictly follow codes as in ISO 639-1.

• Improved chinese dates parsing.

0.3.4 (2016-03-03)

Improvements:

• Fixed broken version 0.3.3 by excluding latest python-dateutil version.

0.3.3 (2016-02-29)

New features:

• Finnish language support.

Improvements:

• Faster parsing with switching to regex module.

• RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE setting to return tz aware date object.

• Fixed conflicts with month/weekday names similarity across languages.

0.3.2 (2016-01-25)

New features:

• Added Hijri Calendar support.

• Added settings for better control over parsing dates.

• Support to convert parsed time to the given timezone for both complete and relative dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed problem with caching datetime.now in FreshnessDateDataParser.

• Added month names and week day names abbreviations to several languages.

• More simplifications for Russian and Ukranian languages.

• Fixed problem with parsing time component of date strings with several kinds of apostrophes.

0.3.1 (2015-10-28)

New features:

• Support for Jalali Calendar.

• Belarusian language support.

• Indonesian language support.

Improvements:

• Extended support for Russian and Polish.

• Fixed bug with time zone recognition.

• Fixed bug with incorrect translation of “second” for Portuguese.

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 Tagalog/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.