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Parse human-readable date/time text.

Project description

parsedatetime

Parse human-readable date/time strings.

Python 2.6 or greater is required for parsedatetime version 1.0 or greater.

Wheel Status

Installing

You can install parsedatetime using:

pip install parsedatetime

Running Tests

From the source directory:

python run_tests.py parsedatetime

Using parsedatetime

An example of how to use parsedatetime:

import parsedatetime

cal = parsedatetime.Calendar()

cal.parse("tomorrow")

More detailed examples can be found in the examples directory.

Documentation

The generated documentation is included by default in the docs directory and can also be viewed online at https://bear.im/code/parsedatetime/docs/index.html

The docs can be generated using either of the two commands:

python setup.py doc
epydoc --html --config epydoc.conf

Notes

The Calendar class has a member property named ptc which is created during the class init method to be an instance of parsedatetime_consts.CalendarConstants().

History

The code in parsedatetime has been implemented over the years in many different languages (C, Clipper, Delphi) as part of different custom/proprietary systems I’ve worked on. Sadly the previous code is not “open” in any sense of that word.

When I went to work for Open Source Applications Foundation and realized that the Chandler project could benefit from my experience with parsing of date/time text I decided to start from scratch and implement the code using Python and make it truly open.

After working on the initial concept and creating something that could be shown to the Chandler folks the code has now evolved to it’s current state with the help the Chandler folks, most especially Darshana.

Mike Taylor https://bear.im Darshana Chhajed <darshana@osafoundation.org> Michael Lim <lim.ck.michael@gmail.com> Bernd Zeimetz <bzed@debian.org> Geoffrey Floyd https://github.com/geoffreyfloyd Alexis Sasha Acker https://github.com/sashaacker Yu-Jie Lin https://github.com/livibetter rl-0x0 https://github.com/rl-0x0 Bernardo Sulzbach https://github.com/mafagafo

see https://github.com/bear/parsedatetime/graphs/contributors for the full list

11 Jul 2014 - bear

Updated setup.py for wheel compatibility renamed README.txt to README.rst renamed MANIFEST to MANIFEST.in cleaned up a lot of the doc and notes

Commit 3fc165e701 mafagafo Now it works for Python 3.4.1 Commit d5883801e7 borgstrom Restore Python 2.6 compatibility

8 Jul 2014 - bear

bumped version to 1.4

Issue #45 make a new release to really fix backwards compatibility Issue #43 Please tag version 1.3

Commit 29c5c8961d devainandor fixed Python 3 compatibility in pdtLocale_icu Commit d7304f18f7 inean Fix support for ‘now’ when no modifiers are present Commit 26bfc91c28 sashaacker Added parseDT method. Commit 848deb47e2 rmecham Added support for dotted meridians. Commit c821e08ce2 ccho-sevenrooms corrected misspelling of ‘thirteen’

24 Jan 2014 - bear

bumped version to 1.3

many changes - amazing how hard it is to keep this file up to date when using GitHub.

See https://github.com/bear/parsedatetime/commits/master for details.

Biggest change is the addition of the nlp() function by Geoffrey Floyd:

nlp() function that utilizes parse() after making judgements about what datetime information belongs together. It makes logical groupings based on proximity and returns a parsed datetime for each matched grouping of datetime text, along with location info within the given inputString.

27 Jun 2013 - bear

bumped version to 1.2

04 Mar 2013 - bear

bumped version to 1.1.2

deploy import fix from Antonio Messina also noticed that the urls were pointing to my older site, corrected

03 Mar 2013 - bear

bumped version to 1.1.1

Ugh - debug log caused an error during formatting Issue 10 https://github.com/bear/parsedatetime/issues/10

14 Nov 2012 - bear

Added test for “last friday” Updated MANIFEST to reflect renamed README file Bumped version to 1.1

15 Mar 2011 - bear

Updated 1.0.0 code to work with 2.6+ (need to try 2.5) and also updated docs and other supporting code

07 Sep 2009 - bear

Created branches/python25 from current trunk to save the current code

Converted trunk to Python 3 and also refactored how the module is structured so that it no longer requires import parsedatetime.parsedatetime

Bumped version to 1.0.0 to reflect the major refactoring

07 Jan 2009 - bear

0.8.7 release Apply patch submitted by Michael Lim to fix the problem parsedatetime was having handling dates when the month day preceeded the month Issue 26 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=26

Fixed TestErrors when in a local where the bad date actually returns a date ;)

Checked in the TestGermanLocale unit test file missed from previous commit

20 Apr 2008 - bear

Upating Copyright year info Fixing defects from Google Project page

The comparison routine for the “failing” test was not accurate. The test was being flagged as failing incorrectly Issue 18 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=18

Added patch from Bernd Zeimetz for the German localized constants! http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/checkout/python-modules/packages/parsedatetime/trunk/debian/patches/locale-de.dpatch He identifies some issues with how unicode is handled and also some other glitches - will have to work on them Issue 20 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=20

Tweaked run_tests.py to default to all tests if not given on the command line Removed ‘this’ from the list of “specials” - it was causing some grief and from the looks of the unit tests, not all that necessary

Worked on bug 19 - Bernd identified that for the German locale the dayofweek check was being triggered for the dayoffset word “morgen” (the “mo” matched the day “morgen”) To solve this I added a small check to make sure if the whole word being checked was not in the dayOffsets list, and if so not trigger. Issue 19 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=19

28 Nov 2007 - bear

0.8.5.1 release - removed debug code

0.8.5 release bumping version to 0.8.6 in trunk

Fixing two bugs found by Chandler QA

Time range of “today 3:30-5pm” was actually causing a traceback. Added a new regex to cover this range type and a new test.

OSAF 11299 https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11299

A really embarrassing for a date/time library - was actually not considering leap years when returning days in a month! Added tests for Feb 29th of various known leap years and also added a check for the daysInMonth() routine which was created to replace the naively simple DaysInMonthList.

OSAF 11203 https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11203

12 Jun 2007 - bear

0.8.4 release bumping version to 0.8.5 in trunk

22 Feb 2007 - bear

Fixed a bug reported via the code.google project page by Alexis where parsedatetime was not parsing day suffixes properly. For example, the text “Aug 25th, 2008” would return the year as 2007 - the parser was not ‘seeing’ 2008 as a part of the expression.

The fix was to enhance one of the “long date” regexes to handle that situation but yet not break the current tests - always fun for sure!

Issue 16 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=16

21 Feb 2007 - bear

Fixed a bug Brian K. (one of the Chandler devs) found when parsing with the locale set to fr_FR. The phrase “same 3 folders” was causing a key error inside the parser and it turns out that it’s because short weekday names in French have a trailing ‘.’ so “sam.” was being used in the regular expression and the ‘.’ was being treated as a regex symbol and not as a period.

It turned out to be a simple fix - just needed to add some code to run re.escape over the lists before adding them to the re_values dictionary.

Also added a TestFrenchLocale set of unit tests but made them only run if PyICU is found until I can build an internal locale for fr_FR. Issue #17 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=17

14 Feb 2007 - bear

0.8.3 release

Minor doc string changes and other typo fixes

Updated Copyright years

Added a fallbackLocales=[] parameter to parsedatetime_consts init routine to control what locales are scanned if the default or given locale is not found in PyICU. Issue #9 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=9

While working on the regex compile-on-demand issue below, I realized that parsedatetime was storing the compiled regex’s locally and that this would cause prevent parsedatetime from switching locales easily. I’ve always wanted to make it so parsedatetime can be set to parse within a locale just by changing a single reference - this is one step closer to that.

Made the regex compiles on-demand to help with performance Requested by the Chandler folks Issue #15 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=15

To test the change I ran 100 times the following code:
for i in range(0, 100):

c = pdc.Constants() p = pdt.Calendar(c) p = None c = None

and that was measured by hotshot:

24356 function calls (22630 primitive calls) in 0.188 CPU seconds

after the change:

5000 function calls in 0.140 CPU seconds

but that doesn’t test the true time as it doesn’t reference any regex’s so any time saved is deferred. To test this I then ran before and after tests where I parsed the major unit test bits:

before the change:

80290 function calls (75929 primitive calls) in 1.055 CPU seconds

after the change:

55803 function calls (52445 primitive calls) in 0.997 CPU seconds

This tells me while doing the lazy compile does save time, it’s not a lot over the normal usage. I’ll leave it in as it is saving time for the simple use-cases.

27 Dec 2006 - bear

Added some support files to try and increase our cheesecake index :)

Created an examples directory and added back the docs/* content so the source distribution will contain the generated docs

Changed how setup.py works to allow for a doc command

26 Dec 2006 - bear

0.8.1 release Setting trunk to 0.8.2

Fixed the ‘eom’ part of testEndOfPhrases. It was not adjusting the year when checking for month rollover to the new year.

Changed API docs to reflect that it’s a struct_time type (or a time tuple) that we accept and return instead of a datetime value. I believe this lead to Issue #14 being reported. Also added some error handling to change a datetime value into a struct_time value if passed to parse().

3 Nov 2006 - darshana

Fixed issue#13 (Nov 4 5pm parses as just 5pm). Also fixed “1-8pm” and other ranges which were not working if there were no spaces before and after the ‘-‘.

1 Nov 2006 - darshana

Strings like “Thursday?” were not parsed. Changes made to the regex to allow special characters to be parsed after weekday names and month names.

24 Oct 2006 - bear

0.8.0 release Setting trunk to 0.8.1

Merged in changes from Darshana’s change_parse_to_return_enum branch

This is a big change in that instead of a simple True/False that is returned to show if the date is valid or not, Parse() now returns a “masked” value that represents what is valid:

date = 1 time = 2

so a value of zero means nothing was parseable/valid and a value of 3 means both were parsed/valid.

20 Oct 2006 - darshana

Implemented the CalculateDOWDelta() method in parsedatetime.py Added a new flag CurrentDOWParseStyle in parsedatetime_consts.py for the current DOW.

19 Oct 2006 - bear

Changed birthday epoch to be a constant defined in parsedatetime_const Lots of little cosmetic code changes Removed the individual files in the docs/ folder Added dist, build and parsedatetime-egg.info to svn:ignore

17 Oct 2006 - darshana

Added birthday epoch constraint Fixed date parsing. 3-digit year not allowed now. Fixed the unit tests too to either have yy or yyyy.

9 Oct 2006 - bear

0.7.4 release Setting trunk to 0.7.5

5 Oct 2006 - darshana

Fixed “ago” bug – Issue #7 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=7

Fixed bug where default year for dates that are in the future get next year, not current year – Issue #8 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=8

Fixed strings like “1 week ago”, “lunch tomorrow”

25 Sep 2006 - bear

0.7.3 release Setting trunk to 0.7.4

13 Sep 2006 - bear

Added Darshana as an author and updated the copyright text Added “eom” and “eoy” tests

11 Sep 2006 - bear

Fixed a subtle dictionary reference bug in buildSources() that was causing any source related modifier to not honor the day, month or year. It only started being seen as I was working on adding “eod” support as a ‘true’ modifier instead.

Found another subtle bug in evalModifier() if the modifier was followed by the day of the week - the offset math was not consistent with the other day-of-week offset calculations.

Worked on converting “eod” support from the special case modifier to work as a true modifier.

The following is now supported:

eod tomorrow tomorrow eod monday eod eod monday meeting eod eod meeting

10 Sep 2006 - bear

Added a sub-range test in response to Issue #6 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=6

Not that it works, just wanted to start the process.

6 Sep 2006 - bear

Alan Green filed Issue #5 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=5

In it he asked for support for Australian date formats “dd-mm-yyyy”

This is the first attempt at supporting the parsing of dates where the order of the day, month and year can vary. I adjusted the parseDate() code to be data driven and added a dp_order list to the Constants() class that is either initialized to the proper order by the pdtLocale classes or the order is determined by parsing the ICU short date format to figure out what the date separator is and then to find out what order it’s in.

I also added a TestAustralianLocale.py as a starting point for tests.

Attaching a diff of this code to the Issue so he can test it.

1 Sep 2006 - bear

0.7.2 release

31 Aug 2006 - bear

Fixed two bugs found by Darshana today.

The first is one of those forehead-slapping bugs that you see as being so obvious after the fact :) The problem is with Inc() for months - if you increment from a month with the day set to a value that is past the end of the month for the new month you get an error. For example Aug 31 to Sept - Sept doesn’t have 31 days so it’s an invalid date.

The second is with the code that identifies modifiers when you have multiple “chunks” of text. Darshana describes the bug this way:

“if you have “flight from SFO at 4pm” i.e. if you have a

non-date/time string before a modifier, then the invalidflag is set”

I provided the Inc() fix and Darshana the modifier fix.

I also added a new unit test for the Inc() bug and also a new test file for the modifier bug: TestPhrases.py

29 Aug 2006 - bear

Updated ez_setup.py to latest version v0.6c1 and removed hard-coded version in setup.py for setuptools

25 Aug 2006 - bear

Moved the error tests into a single TestErrors.py Added two tests for days - it figures out what the previous day and next day is from the weekday the test is run on

24 Aug 2006 - bear

Issue #2 http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/issues/detail?id=2

Turns out that ICU works with weekdays in Sun..Sat order and that Python uses Mon..Sun order. Fixed PyICU locale code to build the internal weekday list to be Python Style.

Bumping version to 0.7.1 as this is causing Chandler bug 6567 http://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6567

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