dateparser 0.7.4

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 of the dates, 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)

OOTB Language Based Date Order Preference

>>> # parsing ambiguous date
>>> parse('02-03-2016')  # assumes english language, uses MDY date order
datetime.datetime(2016, 2, 3, 0, 0)
>>> parse('le 02-03-2016')  # detects french, uses DMY date order
datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 2, 0, 0)

For more on date order, please look at Settings.

Timezone and UTC Offset

By default, dateparser returns tzaware datetime if timezone is present in date string. Otherwise, it returns a naive datetime object.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM EST')
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>)

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM -0500')
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC\-05:00'>)

>>> parse('2 hours ago EST')
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 15, 55, 39, 579667, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>)

>>> parse('2 hours ago -0500')
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 15, 59, 30, 193431, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC\-05:00'>)

If date has no timezone name/abbreviation or offset, you can specify it using TIMEZONE setting.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'US/Eastern'})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0)

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': '+0500'})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0)

TIMEZONE option may not be useful alone as it only attaches given timezone to resultant datetime object. But can be useful in cases where you want conversions from and to different timezones or when simply want a tzaware date with given timezone info attached.

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'US/Eastern', 'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True})
datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'US/Eastern' EST-1 day, 19:00:00 STD>)

>>> parse('10:00 am', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'EST', 'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'})
datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 25, 11, 0)

Some more use cases for conversion of timezones.

>>> parse('10:00 am EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'})  # date string has timezone info
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 11, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EDT'>)

>>> parse('now EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})  # relative dates
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 24, 47, 371823, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

In case, no timezone is present in date string or defined in settings. You can still return tzaware datetime. It is especially useful in case of relative dates when uncertain what timezone is relative base.

>>> parse('2 minutes ago', settings={'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 11, 4, 25, 24, 152670, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo 'Asia/Karachi' PKT+5:00:00 STD>)

In case, you want to compute relative dates in UTC instead of default system’s local timezone, you can use TIMEZONE setting.

>>> parse('4 minutes ago', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 27, 59, 647248, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

For more on timezones, please look at Settings.

Incomplete Dates

>>> from dateparser import parse
>>> parse(u'December 2015')  # default behavior
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 16, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'last'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 31, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'first'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 1, 0, 0)

>>> parse(u'March')
datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 16, 0, 0)
>>> parse(u'March', settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': 'future'})
datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 16, 0, 0)
>>> # parsing with preference set for 'past'
>>> parse('August', settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': 'past'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 15, 0, 0)

You can also ignore parsing incomplete dates altogether by setting STRICT_PARSING flag as follows:

>>> parse(u'December 2015', settings={'STRICT_PARSING': True})
None

For more on handling incomplete dates, please look at Settings.

Search for Dates in Longer Chunks of Text

You can extract dates from longer strings of text. They are returned as list of tuples with text chunk containing the date and parsed datetime object.

0.7.4 (2020-03-06)

Improvements:

• Fixed Python 2.7 tests

0.7.3 (2020-03-06)

New features:

• Extended Norwegian support (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/598)

• Implement a PARSERS setting (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/603)

Improvements:

• Add support for PREFER_DATES_FROM in relative/freshness parser (https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/414)

• Add support for PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH in base-formats parser (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/611)

• Added UTC -00:00 as a valid offset (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/574)

• Fix support for “one” (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/593)

• Fix TypeError when parsing some invalid dates (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/536)

• Fix tokenizer for non recognized characters (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/622)

• Prevent installing regex 2019.02.19 (https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/600)

• Resolve DeprecationWarning related to raw string escape sequences (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/596)

• Implement a tox environment to build the documentation (https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/604)

• Improve tests stability (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/591, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/605)

• Documentation improvements (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/510, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/578, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/619, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/614, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/620)

• Performance improvements (see https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/570, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/569, https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull/625)

0.7.2 (2019-09-17)

Features:

• Extended Czech support

• Added time to valid periods

• Added timezone information to dates found with search_dates()

• Support strings as date formats

Improvements:

• Fixed Collections ABCs depreciation warning

• Fixed dates with trailing colons not being parsed

• Fixed date format override on any settings change

• Fixed parsing current weekday as past date, regardless of settings

• Added UTC -2:30 as a valid offset

• Added Python 3.7 to supported versions, dropped support for Python 3.3 and 3.4

• Moved to importlib from imp where possible

• Improved support for Catalan

• Documentation improvements

0.7.1 (2019-02-12)

Features/news:

• Added detected language to return value of search_dates()

• Performance improvements

• Refreshed versions of dependencies

Improvements:

• Fixed unpickleable DateTime objects with timezones

• Fixed regex pattern to avoid new behaviour of re.split in Python 3.7

• Fixed an exception thrown when parsing colons

• Fixed tests failing on days with number greater than 30

• Fixed ZeroDivisionError exceptions

0.7.0 (2018-02-08)

Features added during Google Summer of Code 2017:

• Harvesting language data from Unicode CLDR database (https://github.com/unicode-cldr/cldr-json), which includes over 200 locales (#321) - authored by Sarthak Maddan. See full currently supported locale list in README.

• Extracting dates from longer strings of text (#324) - authored by Elena Zakharova. Special thanks for their awesome contributions!

New features:

• Added (independently from CLDR) Georgian (#308) and Swedish (#305)

Improvements:

• Improved support of Chinese (#359), Thai (#345), French (#301, #304), Russian (#302)

• Removed ruamel.yaml from dependencies (#374). This should reduce the number of installation issues and improve performance as the result of moving away from YAML as basic data storage format. Note that YAML is still used as format for support language files.

• Improved performance through using pre-compiling frequent regexes and lazy loading of data (#293, #294, #295, #315)

• Extended tests (#316, #317, #318, #323)

• Updated nose_parameterized to its current package, parameterized (#381)

Planned for next release:

• Full language and locale names

• Performance and stability improvements

• Documentation improvements

0.6.0 (2017-03-13)

New features:

• Consistent parsing in terms of true python representation of date string. See #281

• Added support for Bangla, Bulgarian and Hindi languages.

Improvements:

• Major bug fixes related to parser and system’s locale. See #277, #282

• Type check for timezone arguments in settings. see #267

• Pinned dependencies’ versions in requirements. See #265

• Improved support for cn, es, dutch languages. See #274, #272, #285

Packaging:

• Make calendars extras to be used at the time of installation if need to use calendars feature.

0.5.1 (2016-12-18)

New features:

• Added support for Hebrew

Improvements:

• Safer loading of YAML. See #251

• Better timezone parsing for freshness dates. See #256

• Pinned dependencies’ versions in requirements. See #265

• Improved support for zh, fi languages. See #249, #250, #248, #244

0.5.0 (2016-09-26)

New features:

• DateDataParser now also returns detected language in the result dictionary.

• Explicit and lucid timezone conversion for a given datestring using TIMEZONE, TO_TIMEZONE settings.

• Added Hungarian language.

• Added setting, STRICT_PARSING to ignore incomplete dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed quite a few parser bugs reported in issues #219, #222, #207, #224.

• Improved support for chinese language.

• Consistent interface for both Jalali and Hijri parsers.

0.4.0 (2016-06-17)

New features:

• Support for Language based date order preference while parsing ambiguous dates.

• Support for parsing dates with no spaces in between components.

• Support for custom date order preference using settings.

• Support for parsing generic relative dates in future.e.g. tomorrow, in two weeks, etc.

• Added RELATIVE_BASE settings to set date context to any datetime in past or future.

• Replaced dateutil.parser.parse with dateparser’s own parser.

Improvements:

• Added simplifications for 12 noon and 12 midnight.

• Fixed several bugs

• Replaced PyYAML library by its active fork ruamel.yaml which also fixed the issues with installation on windows using python35.

• More predictable date_formats handling.

0.3.5 (2016-04-27)

New features:

• Danish language support.

• Japanese language support.

• Support for parsing date strings with accents.

Improvements:

• Transformed languages.yaml into base file and separate files for each language.

• Fixed vietnamese language simplifications.

• No more version restrictions for python-dateutil.

• Timezone parsing improvements.

• Fixed test environments.

• Cleaned language codes. Now we strictly follow codes as in ISO 639-1.

• Improved chinese dates parsing.

0.3.4 (2016-03-03)

Improvements:

• Fixed broken version 0.3.3 by excluding latest python-dateutil version.

0.3.3 (2016-02-29)

New features:

• Finnish language support.

Improvements:

• Faster parsing with switching to regex module.

• RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE setting to return tz aware date object.

• Fixed conflicts with month/weekday names similarity across languages.

0.3.2 (2016-01-25)

New features:

• Added Hijri Calendar support.

• Added settings for better control over parsing dates.

• Support to convert parsed time to the given timezone for both complete and relative dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed problem with caching datetime.now in FreshnessDateDataParser.

• Added month names and week day names abbreviations to several languages.

• More simplifications for Russian and Ukrainian languages.

• Fixed problem with parsing time component of date strings with several kinds of apostrophes.

0.3.1 (2015-10-28)

New features:

• Support for Jalali Calendar.

• Belarusian language support.

• Indonesian language support.

Improvements:

• Extended support for Russian and Polish.

• Fixed bug with time zone recognition.

• Fixed bug with incorrect translation of “second” for Portuguese.

0.3.0 (2015-07-29)

New features:

• Compatibility with Python 3 and PyPy.

Improvements:

• languages.yaml data cleaned up to make it human-readable.

• Improved Spanish date parsing.

0.2.1 (2015-07-13)

• Support for generic parsing of dates with UTC offset.

• Support for Tagalog/Filipino dates.

• Improved support for French and Spanish dates.

0.2.0 (2015-06-17)

• Easy to use parse function

• Languages definitions using YAML.

• Using translation based approach for parsing non-english languages. Previously, dateutil.parserinfo was used for language definitions.

• Better period extraction.

• Improved tests.

• Added a number of new simplifications for more comprehensive generic parsing.

• Improved validation for dates.

• Support for Polish, Thai and Arabic dates.

• Support for pytz timezones.

• Fixed building and packaging issues.

0.1.0 (2014-11-24)

• First release on PyPI.