How can I translate dates and times from natural language to datetime?

Question

I’m looking for a way to translate ‘tomorrow at 6am’ or ‘next monday at noon’ to the appropriate datetime objects.

I thought of engineering a complex set of rules, but is there another way?

Asked By: Vasil

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Answer 1

parsedatetime – Python module that is able to parse ‘human readable’ date/time expressions.

#!/usr/bin/env python
from datetime import datetime
import parsedatetime as pdt # $ pip install parsedatetime

cal = pdt.Calendar()
now = datetime.now()
print("now: %s" % now)
for time_string in ["tomorrow at 6am", "next moday at noon", 
                    "2 min ago", "3 weeks ago", "1 month ago"]:
   print("%s:t%s" % (time_string, cal.parseDT(time_string, now)[0]))

Output

now: 2015-10-18 13:55:29.732131
tomorrow at 6am:    2015-10-19 06:00:00
next moday at noon: 2015-10-18 12:00:00
2 min ago:  2015-10-18 13:53:29
3 weeks ago:    2015-09-27 13:55:29
1 month ago:    2015-09-18 13:55:29

Answered By: Alex Barrett

Answer 2

See what you think of this example from the pyparsing wiki. It handles the following test cases:

today
tomorrow
yesterday
in a couple of days
a couple of days from now
a couple of days from today
in a day
3 days ago
3 days from now
a day ago
now
10 minutes ago
10 minutes from now
in 10 minutes
in a minute
in a couple of minutes
20 seconds ago
in 30 seconds
20 seconds before noon
20 seconds before noon tomorrow
noon
midnight
noon tomorrow
6am tomorrow
0800 yesterday
12:15 AM today
3pm 2 days from today
a week from today
a week from now
3 weeks ago
noon next Sunday
noon Sunday
noon last Sunday

Answered By: PaulMcG

How can I translate dates and times from natural language to datetime?

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