superdate 0.2.2

parse_date

The parse_date function parses dates from strings. These can be plain iso strings or colloquial English strings. Plain English strings are parsed with down to second precision using the parsedatetime library.

If a time was detected, then a datetime will be returned. If no time information was detected then a date object will be returned. A datetime can be forced to return with force_time=True.

The difference between this function and vanilla parsedatetime is a cache. Dates parsed from Non-ISO strings are cached for faster lookup. This cache clears if a new second has ticked over since the previous call.

# Some examples. Logged on February 26th 2023.

>>> from superdate import parse_date

>>> parse_date('1970-1-1')
datetime.date(1970, 1, 1)

>>> parse_date('today')
datetime.date(2023, 2, 26)

# Force a time
>>> parse_date('today', force_time=True)
datetime.datetime(2023, 2, 26, 9, 0)

>>> parse_date('now')
datetime.datetime(2023, 2, 26, 14, 32)

>>> parse_date('saturday')
datetime.date(2023, 3, 4)

>>> parse_date('saturday at noon')
datetime.datetime(2023, 3, 4, 12, 0)

>>> parse_date('January')
datetime.date(2024, 1, 1)

SuperDate

The SuperDate class wraps the parse_date function, but overloads all comparison operators to allow for more intuitive plain-english comparisons.

Comparisons between dates and datetimes will ignore the time. This is because a very common use case is, for example, a user who asks “what appointments are on Wednesday?”

[a for a in appointments if a.date == 'Wednesday']

Typically “Wednesday” would include hour 0, minute 0, and second 0, which isn’t technically equivalent to an appointment at 4pm. Obviously this user wants to see all their appointments on Wednesday, so the time for each appointment will be ignored when comparing against a plain date.

# Some examples
from superdate import SuperDate

SuperDate('Wednesday') == 'Wednesday'  # => True
SuperDate('Wednesday') < 'Wednesday 4pm'  # => False
SuperDate('Wednesday') == 'Wednesday 4pm'  # => True
SuperDate('Wednesday at noon') < 'Wednesday 4pm'  # => True

# Will evaluate to True because we forced a time.
SuperDate('Wednesday', force_time=True) < 'Wednesday 4pm'  # => True

All dot operators (.hour .day .strftime etc…) are forwarded to the underlying python3 standard date / datetime object, so this class should be usable anywhere a regular datetime is.