PrettyTime

Version 0.0.5a

Had enough of dates and times in Python? Sick of boilerplate like datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(weeks=12) when you're just trying to say "three months from now"?

Welcome to PrettyTime:

t(3).months.from_.today

PrettyTime is a small Python package that intends to create a better interface for working with dates and times in Python. It was inspired by Rails' syntax for dates and times, like:

3.days.ago
2.hours.from_now

Though Python does not allow the same type of built-in monkey-patching, you can get decently close. An example of what PrettyTime currently offers:

>>> t(4).hours.from_.now
datetime.datetime(2014, 6, 7, 3, 51, 51, 422545)
>>> t(1).years.from_.today
datetime.date(2015, 6, 6)
>>> t()
datetime.datetime(2014, 7, 28, 16, 58, 1, 229448)

Usage

Download

Install from PyPI:

pip install prettytime

Alternatively, you can clone the GitHub repository:

git clone https://github.com/jdotjdot/PrettyTime

Import

from prettytime import t

Use

Because you can't override Python literals, all integers must be wrapped by t(). Everything else tries to be normal English.

Just using t() by itself with no arguments returns the time now, directly calling datetime.datetime.now(). You can get today's date with t().date()

Commands currently supported:

Date/Time	Relative	Optional	Optional
`second(s)`	`ago`	`next`	`week`
`minute(s)`	`from_`	`last`	`month`
`hour(s)`	`before`	`now`	`year`
`day(s)`	`after`	`today`
`week(s)`		`tomorrow`
`month(s)`		`yesterday`
`year(s)`		`then`

To get the time difference from an arbitrary date, you can pass in a date or datetime object (including those generated by PrettyTime) into the then() method.

Examples:

>>> from prettytime import *
>>> t(3).days.from_.next.year
datetime.date(2015, 6, 15)
>>> t(4).years.ago
datetime.date(2010, 6, 12)
>>> t(10).months.before.last.week
datetime.date(2013, 8, 5)
>>> t(7).minutes.after.tomorrow
datetime.datetime(2014, 6, 13, 23, 57, 44, 38401)
>>> t(2).days.from_.then(datetime.date(2015, 2, 3))
datetime.date(2015, 2, 5)
>>> t(3).days.from_.today == t(3).days.from_.then(t().date())
True

Planned changes:

Add django-pretty-times-like functionality to allow pretty printing as well

Changelog:

1/28/2018 - Python 3 compatibility
7/28/2014 - t() returns a datetime.datetime.now() object