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 is built automatically and can be found on Read the Docs.

Features

• Generic parsing of dates in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and several other languages 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 or UTC offsets like: 'August 14, 2015 EST', 'July 4, 2013 PST', '21 July 2013 10:15 pm +0500'.
• Support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. See Supported Calendars.
• 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 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)

Note

Testing above code might return different values for you depending on your environment's current date and time.

Dependencies

dateparser relies on following libraries in some ways:

• dateutil's module parser to parse the translated dates.
• PyYAML for reading language and configuration files.
• jdatetime to convert Jalali dates to Gregorian.
• umalqurra to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian.

Supported languages

• Arabic
• Belarusian
• Chinese
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English
• Tagalog/Filipino
• Finnish
• French
• German
• Indonesian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Persian
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Spanish
• Thai
• Turkish
• Ukrainian
• Vietnamese

Supported Calendars

• Gregorian calendar.

• Persian Jalali calendar. For more information, refer to Persian Jalali Calendar.

• Hijri/Islamic Calendar. For more information, refer to Hijri Calendar.

  >>> from dateparser.calendars.jalali import JalaliParser
  >>> JalaliParser(u'جمعه سی ام اسفند ۱۳۸۷').get_date()
  datetime.datetime(2009, 3, 20, 0, 0)

  >>> from dateparser.calendars.hijri import HijriCalendar
  >>> HijriCalendar(u'17-01-1437 هـ 08:30 مساءً').get_date()
  {'date_obj': datetime.datetime(2015, 10, 30, 20, 30), 'period': 'day'}

Note

HijriCalendar has some limitations with Python 3.

Note

For Finnish language, please specify settings={'SKIP_TOKENS': []} to correctly parse freshness dates.