dateparser -- python parser for human readable dates

dateparser provides modules to easily parse localized dates in almost any string formats commonly found on web pages.

Documentation

Documentation can be found here.

Features

Generic parsing of dates in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and several other langauges and formats.
Generic parsing of relative dates like: '1 min ago', '2 weeks ago', '3 months, 1 week and 1 day ago'.
Generic parsing of dates with time zones abbreviations like: 'August 14, 2015 EST', 'July 4, 2013 PST'.
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.

.. automodule:: dateparser
   :members: parse

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 that the date will be, 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.

Dependencies

dateparser translates non-english dates to English and uses dateutil module 'parser' to parse the translated date.

Also, it requires PyYAML for its language detection module to work.

Limitations

Only Python 2 support for now (Python 3 support will be added in future versions)
dateparser at this point does not support generic parsing of dates with fixed UTC offsets. This restricts its ability to reliably parse time zone aware dates since the use of abbreviated time zones as a sole designator of time zones is not recommended.

Read Wikipedia Time Zone article for more information.

MojoJolo/dateparser