A collection of free-form input parsers (with special focus on dates)
Project description
Introduction and Examples
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: ambiguous match for 'a'
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 parse_date >>> parse_date('jun 17 2010') # my youngest son's birthday datetime.date(2010, 6, 17)
The library allows setting a default date to fill in specified components of a date (e.g. the year). By default, a date with-out a year to will give the current year.
>>> from fuzzyparsers import DateParser >>> import datetime >>> DateParser(today=datetime.date(2013, 3, 1)).parse_date('feb 3') datetime.date(2013, 2, 3)
TODO
We’d like to support the following features:
Parsing time strings like “10 am” and “2 3 pm”
A “[0-9]*.[0-9]*” with the first hunk a month and the second hunk a day should return the month/day combination which is nearest. For example, “12-3” would return december 3 of this year or last year.
Changelog
0.7.2 - added doc-tests and “march 2012” date format; doc-test scripts
0.7.1 - install fixes
0.7 - overhaul of date parsing api to support relative dates (not necessarily relative to the current date)
0.6.x - initial public release and series of doc/install corrections
Installation
Fuzzyparsers is written by Joel B. Mohler and distributed under the terms of the GPL v2 (or later).
Use the following commands to run the extensive doc-tests:
python -m doctest fuzzyparsers/*.py python -m doctest README.txt
To install fuzzyparsers, do the normal python thing (probably as root):
python setup.py install
or:
eazy_install fuzzyparsers
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