[Python] Various strings to dates.

Amy,
I hope there is a better way but, if you go here:

http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/datetime-date.html

The new datetime module may help. This and the time mod
should get you where you want to go.

list = strdate.split(", ")
daystr = list[0]
daynum = int(list[1])
monthstr = list[2]
year = int(list[3])
#funct to get a month int is needed

d = datetime.Date(y,m,d)

wes

---------------------------------------

Amy G wrote:

No it won't. Unfortunatly I don't necessarily have a comma delimited date
string. Thanks for the input though.

The following three date strings is another example of the various date
formats I will encounter here.

Thursday, 22 January 2004 03:15:06
Thursday, January 22, 2004, 03:15:06
2004, Thursday, 22 January 03:15:06

All of these are essentially the same date... just in various formats. I
would like to parse through them and get a comparable format so that I can
display them in chronological order.


"wes weston" <wweston at att.net> wrote in message
news:MFgQb.95539$6y6.1915432 at bgtnsc05-news.ops.worldnet.att.net...
search
the
following
03:15:06")
get a

Amy> The following three date strings is another example of the various
Amy> date formats I will encounter here.

Amy> Thursday, 22 January 2004 03:15:06
Amy> Thursday, January 22, 2004, 03:15:06
Amy> 2004, Thursday, 22 January 03:15:06

Assuming you won't have any ambiguous dates (like 1/3/04), just define
regular expressions which label the various fields of interest, then match
your string against them until you get a hit. For
example, the first would be matched by this:
... r'(?P<month>[A-Z][a-z]+)\s+(?P<year>[0-9]{4,4})')
<_sre.SRE_Match object at 0x487498>
('Thursday', '22', 'January', '2004')
'January'

etc. (Extending the regexp to accommodate the time is left as an exercise.)
Once you have a match, pull out the relevant bits, maybe tweak them a bit
(int()-ify things), then create a datetime instance from the result.

I do something like this in my dates module. It's old and ugly though:

http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/python/

Search for "date-parsing module". This was written long before the datetime
module was available and was used for for a slightly different purpose. It
recognizes a number of different date range formats in addition to
individual dates. You might be able to snag some regular expression ideas
from it though.

Skip

"Amy G" <amy-g-art at cox.net> wrote in message
news:PRgQb.16209$AA6.9881 at fed1read03...
to
This was asked and answered earlier today

See: https://moin.conectiva.com.br/DateUtil
datetime.datetime(2004, 1, 22, 3, 15, 6)
datetime.datetime(2004, 1, 22, 3, 15, 6)
datetime.datetime(2004, 1, 22, 3, 15, 6)
>>>

That is exactly what I am looking for. However I don't have the module
installed. Where can I get it?

"Michael Spencer" <michael at telcopartners.com> wrote in message
news:K4ydna_ey7rvOIzdRVn-jw at comcast.com...
date
I
can
google
email.
to
far.

When I tried to do the make install I get the following error message:

warning: install: modules installed to '/usr/lib/python2.2/site-packages/',
which is not in Python's module search path (sys.path) -- you'll have to
change the search path yourself

How do I correct this. Sorry for the newb question.



"Michael Spencer" <michael at telcopartners.com> wrote in message
news:K4ydna_ey7rvOIzdRVn-jw at comcast.com...
date
I
can
google
email.
to
far.

Some extra info... when I get this
['', '/usr/local/lib/python2.2', '/usr/local/lib/python2.2/plat-freebsd5',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.2/lib-tk', '/usr/local/lib/python2.2/lib-dynload',
'/usr/local/lib/python2.2/site-packages']

Doesn't that mean that the directory is already in the path???

"Michael Spencer" <michael at telcopartners.com> wrote in message
news:K4ydna_ey7rvOIzdRVn-jw at comcast.com...
date
I
can
google
email.
to
far.

Okay. I fixed the problem somewhat. I moved the dateutil directory over to
/usr/local/lib/python2.2/site-packages and I can now import dateutil. But a
call like this:

from dateutil.parser import parse

results in this error:

ImportError: cannot import name parse

I can 'from dateutil.parser import *' but cannot use parse after that.
I can also 'from dateutil import parser' but that doesn't help either.

Sorry for my inexperience here. Thanks for all of the help already.

"Amy G" <amy-g-art at cox.net> wrote in message
news:PRgQb.16209$AA6.9881 at fed1read03...
to

[Fixed top-posts: please add future comments at the bottom]
google
email.
to
far.
date
I
can
"Amy G" <amy-g-art at cox.net> wrote in message
news:n7iQb.16224$AA6.5862 at fed1read03...
Amy:

The docstring of the dateutil package:
"""
Copyright (c) 2003 Gustavo Niemeyer <niemeyer at conectiva.com>

This module offers extensions to the standard python 2.3+
datetime module.
"""
__author__ = "Gustavo Niemeyer <niemeyer at conectiva.com>"
__license__ = "PSF License"

notes that it requires the datetime module (new in Python 2.3). It appears
that you are using 2.2. Can you install 2.3.3?

If you need to stick with 2.2, the question of using datetime in 2.2 was
answered in
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=python+2.2+datetime&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=mailman.1043334342.25146.python-list%40python.org&rnum=2
with a pointer to a "workalike" module, see:
http://cvs.zope.org/Zope3/src/datetime/

I have not tested whether this works with dateutil

Cheers

Michael

"Amy G" <amy-g-art at cox.net> wrote in message
news:4GfQb.16187$AA6.14368 at fed1read03...
This is what I use to parse dates of unknown provinance.
It's laughably overengineered, and I don't include the day
of the week or the time. Given your examples, though,
those should be easy enough to deal with.

HTH
John Roth

class DateContainer(object):
_typeDict = {}
_stringValue = ""
_typeDict["stringValue"] = "String"
_typeDict["value"] = "String"
_value = ""
year = 1
month = 1
day = 1
bc = ""

def _checkUserFriendlyDate(self, date):
# The rules for a user friendly date are:
# 1. The year must be at least three digits, including
# leading zeroes if necessary. Day and numeric month
# may be no longer than 2 digits.
# 2. The month may be alphabetic or numeric. If it's
# alphabetic, it must be at least three letters long.
# 3. The epoch may be ad, bc, bce or ce. If omitted, it's
# assumed to be ad.
# 4. After removing the year, epoch and an alphabetic month,
# the remaining single piece is the day, or the piece that
# is greater than 12.
# 5. If two pieces remain, the first is the month, the second
# is the day. Both are between 1 and 12, inclusive.
partList = dateTimeParse(date)
if not(2 < len(partList) < 5):
raise ValueError, "incorrect part list: %s" % (partList,)
bc = self._findBC(partList)
if len(partList) != 3:
return "too many components in date: '%s'" % date
year = self._findYear(partList)
month = self._findAlphaMonth(partList)
if month != 0:
day = partList[0]
else:
day = self._findDay(partList)
if day:
month = partList[0]
else:
month, day = partList
year = self._checkNum(year, 4712)
day = self._checkNum(day, 31)
month = self._checkNum(month, 12)
if bc in ("AD", "CE"):
bc = ""
self.year, self.month, self.day, self.bc = year, month, day, bc
return True

def _checkNum(self, num, limit):
result = int(num)
if result > limit:
raise ValueError, "number '%s' out of range '%s'" % (num, limit)
return result

def _findBC(self, partList):
for i in range(len(partList)):
word = partList[i]
if word in ("AD", "BC", "CE", "BCE"):
del partList[i]
return word
# XXX if len(partList > 3): error
return ""

def _findYear(self, partList):
for i in range(len(partList)):
word = partList[i]
if len(word) > 2 and word.isdigit():
del partList[i]
return word
raise ValueError

def _findAlphaMonth(self, partList):
for i in range(len(partList)):
word = partList[i]
if word.isalpha():
del partList[i]
return ['JAN', 'FEB', 'MAR', 'APR', 'MAY', 'JUN',
'JUL', 'AUG', 'SEP', 'OCT', 'NOV',
'DEC'].index(word[:3]) + 1
return 0

def _findDay(self, partList):
for i in range(len(partList)):
word = partList[i]
if word.isdigit() and int(word) > 12:
del partList[i]
return word
return ""

def _getStringValue(self):
return self._stringValue

def _setStringValue(self, value):
self._checkUserFriendlyDate(value)
self._stringValue = value

_typeDict["stringValue"] = "String"
stringValue = property(_getStringValue, _setStringValue,
doc="User Friendly Date")

def _getValue(self):
isoDate = "%04u-%02u-%02u %s" % (self.year, self.month, self.day,
self.bc)
return isoDate.strip()

def checkISODate(self, value):
year = self._checkNum(value[:4], 4712)
month = self._checkNum(value[5:7], 12)
day = self._checkNum(value[8:10], 31)
if len(value) > 10:
bc = value[11:]
if not (bc.upper() in ("AD", "BC", "BCE", "CE")):
raise ValueError
if bc in ("AD", "CE"):
bc = ""
self.year, self.month, self.day, self.bc = year, month, day, bc
return

def _setValue(self, value):
self._checkISODate(value)
isoDate = "%04u-%02u-%02u %s" % (self.year, self.month, self.day,
self.bc)
self.stringValue = isoDate
return None

value = property(_getValue, _setValue,
doc = "ISO Standard Format Date")

#!/usr/local/bin/python -O

#NOTE: add missing MONTHS; DAYS not used

import datetime
import string

dateList = ["Fri, 23 Jan 2004 00:06:15",
"Thursday, 22 January 2004 03:15:06",
"Thursday, January 22, 2004, 03:15:06",
"2004, Thursday, 22 January 03:15:06"]
MONTHS = [("JANUARY",1),
("JAN",1),
("FEBRUARY",2),
("FEB",2),
#etc
]
DAYS = [("Monday",0),
("Mon",0),
#........
("Thursday",3),
("Thur",3)
]
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
def GetMonthInt(mstr):
#print "mstr=",mstr
for t in MONTHS:
if t[0].find(mstr) > -1:
return t[1]
return -1
#--------------------------------------------------------------------
class MyDateTime:
def __init__(self,oddstr):
tokens = oddstr.split()
temp = []
for t in tokens:
if t.find(":") > -1:
continue
if t[-1] == ',':
t = t[:-1]
temp.append(t)
tokens = temp
#for t in tokens:
# print t
year = -1
month = -1
day = -1
for t in tokens:
if t[0] in string.digits:
x = int(t)
if x > 31:
year = x
else:
day = x
continue
t = t.upper()
if t[0] in string.ascii_uppercase:
x = GetMonthInt(t)
if x <> -1:
month = x
continue
if year > -1 and month > -1 and day > -1:
self.Date = datetime.date(year,month,day)
else:
self.Date = None
def Show(self):
print self.Date.ctime()

#--------------------------------------------------------------------
if __name__ == '__main__':
for date in dateList:
dt = MyDateTime(date)
dt.Show()