fuzzyparsers 0.6.2

A collection of free-form input parsers (with special focus on dates)

The fuzzyparsers library provides a small collection of functions to sanitize free form user input. For the moment its chief value is the flexible date parser.

The library has two main parsers. The first is a prefix parser which compares a string to a list of strings and returns the unique element of the list which matches the prefix. An exception is thrown if the match is not unique.

>>> from fuzzyparsers import fuzzy_match
>>> fuzzy_match(['aab','bba','abc'],'aa')
'aab'
>>> fuzzy_match(['aab','bba','abc'],'a')  # two strings starting with 'a'.
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
ValueError: ambigious match

The second parser parses dates in various formats and returns a datetime.date object. Accepted formats include:

jan 12, 2003
jan 5
2004-3-5
+34 -- 34 days in the future (relative to todays date)
-4 -- 4 days in the past (relative to todays date)

For instance:

>>> from fuzzyparsers import sanitized_date
>>> sanitized_date('jun 17 2010') # my youngest son's birthday
datetime.date(2010, 6, 17)

Fuzzyparsers is written by Joel B. Mohler and distributed under the terms of the GPL v2 (or later).

The doc-tests provide fair code coverage. Use the following command:

python -m doctest fuzzyparsers/*.py

To install fuzzyparsers, do the normal python thing (probably as root):

python setup.py install

or:

eazy_install fuzzyparsers