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 over 200 language locales plus numerous formats in a language agnostic fashion.
• Generic parsing of relative dates like: '1 min ago', '2 weeks ago', '3 months, 1 week and 1 day ago', 'in 2 days', 'tomorrow'.
• 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'.
• Date lookup in longer texts.
• 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.

Note

Support for relative dates in future needs a lot of improvement, we look forward to community's contribution to get better on that part. See `Contributing`_.

OOTB Language Based Date Order Preference

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

Note

Ordering is not locale based, that's why do not expect DMY order for UK/Australia English. You can specify date order in that case as follows usings `Settings`_:

>>> parse('18-12-15 06:00', settings={'DATE_ORDER': 'DMY'})
datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 18, 6, 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'>)

Note

In case, when timezone is present both in string and also specified using settings, string is parsed into tzaware representation and then converted to timezone specified in settings.

>>> parse('10:40 pm PKT', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 17, 40, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

>>> parse('20 mins ago EST', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'})
datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 21, 16, 0, 885091, 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.

>>> from dateparser.search import search_dates
>>> search_dates("The client arrived to the office for the first time in March 3rd, 2004 and got serviced, after a couple of months, on May 6th 2004, the customer returned indicating a defect on the part")
[(u'in March 3rd, 2004 and', datetime.datetime(2004, 3, 3, 0, 0)),
 (u'on May 6th 2004', datetime.datetime(2004, 5, 6, 0, 0))]

Dependencies

dateparser relies on following libraries in some ways:

• dateutil's module relativedelta for its freshness parser.
• jdatetime to convert Jalali dates to Gregorian.
• umalqurra to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian.
• tzlocal to reliably get local timezone.
• ruamel.yaml (optional) for operations on language files.

Supported languages and locales

Language	Locales
en	'en-001', 'en-150', 'en-AG', 'en-AI', 'en-AS', 'en-AT', 'en-AU', 'en-BB', 'en-BE', 'en-BI', 'en-BM', 'en-BS', 'en-BW', 'en-BZ', 'en-CA', 'en-CC', 'en-CH', 'en-CK', 'en-CM', 'en-CX', 'en-CY', 'en-DE', 'en-DG', 'en-DK', 'en-DM', 'en-ER', 'en-FI', 'en-FJ', 'en-FK', 'en-FM', 'en-GB', 'en-GD', 'en-GG', 'en-GH', 'en-GI', 'en-GM', 'en-GU', 'en-GY', 'en-HK', 'en-IE', 'en-IL', 'en-IM', 'en-IN', 'en-IO', 'en-JE', 'en-JM', 'en-KE', 'en-KI', 'en-KN', 'en-KY', 'en-LC', 'en-LR', 'en-LS', 'en-MG', 'en-MH', 'en-MO', 'en-MP', 'en-MS', 'en-MT', 'en-MU', 'en-MW', 'en-MY', 'en-NA', 'en-NF', 'en-NG', 'en-NL', 'en-NR', 'en-NU', 'en-NZ', 'en-PG', 'en-PH', 'en-PK', 'en-PN', 'en-PR', 'en-PW', 'en-RW', 'en-SB', 'en-SC', 'en-SD', 'en-SE', 'en-SG', 'en-SH', 'en-SI', 'en-SL', 'en-SS', 'en-SX', 'en-SZ', 'en-TC', 'en-TK', 'en-TO', 'en-TT', 'en-TV', 'en-TZ', 'en-UG', 'en-UM', 'en-VC', 'en-VG', 'en-VI', 'en-VU', 'en-WS', 'en-ZA', 'en-ZM', 'en-ZW'
zh
zh-Hans	'zh-Hans-HK', 'zh-Hans-MO', 'zh-Hans-SG'
hi
es	'es-419', 'es-AR', 'es-BO', 'es-BR', 'es-BZ', 'es-CL', 'es-CO', 'es-CR', 'es-CU', 'es-DO', 'es-EA', 'es-EC', 'es-GQ', 'es-GT', 'es-HN', 'es-IC', 'es-MX', 'es-NI', 'es-PA', 'es-PE', 'es-PH', 'es-PR', 'es-PY', 'es-SV', 'es-US', 'es-UY', 'es-VE'
ar	'ar-AE', 'ar-BH', 'ar-DJ', 'ar-DZ', 'ar-EG', 'ar-EH', 'ar-ER', 'ar-IL', 'ar-IQ', 'ar-JO', 'ar-KM', 'ar-KW', 'ar-LB', 'ar-LY', 'ar-MA', 'ar-MR', 'ar-OM', 'ar-PS', 'ar-QA', 'ar-SA', 'ar-SD', 'ar-SO', 'ar-SS', 'ar-SY', 'ar-TD', 'ar-TN', 'ar-YE'
bn	'bn-IN'
fr	'fr-BE', 'fr-BF', 'fr-BI', 'fr-BJ', 'fr-BL', 'fr-CA', 'fr-CD', 'fr-CF', 'fr-CG', 'fr-CH', 'fr-CI', 'fr-CM', 'fr-DJ', 'fr-DZ', 'fr-GA', 'fr-GF', 'fr-GN', 'fr-GP', 'fr-GQ', 'fr-HT', 'fr-KM', 'fr-LU', 'fr-MA', 'fr-MC', 'fr-MF', 'fr-MG', 'fr-ML', 'fr-MQ', 'fr-MR', 'fr-MU', 'fr-NC', 'fr-NE', 'fr-PF', 'fr-PM', 'fr-RE', 'fr-RW', 'fr-SC', 'fr-SN', 'fr-SY', 'fr-TD', 'fr-TG', 'fr-TN', 'fr-VU', 'fr-WF', 'fr-YT'
ur	'ur-IN'
pt	'pt-AO', 'pt-CH', 'pt-CV', 'pt-GQ', 'pt-GW', 'pt-LU', 'pt-MO', 'pt-MZ', 'pt-PT', 'pt-ST', 'pt-TL'
ru	'ru-BY', 'ru-KG', 'ru-KZ', 'ru-MD', 'ru-UA'
id
sw	'sw-CD', 'sw-KE', 'sw-UG'
pa-Arab
de	'de-AT', 'de-BE', 'de-CH', 'de-IT', 'de-LI', 'de-LU'
ja
te
mr
vi
fa	'fa-AF'
ta	'ta-LK', 'ta-MY', 'ta-SG'
tr	'tr-CY'
yue
ko	'ko-KP'
it	'it-CH', 'it-SM', 'it-VA'
fil
gu
th
kn
ps
zh-Hant	'zh-Hant-HK', 'zh-Hant-MO'
ml
or
pl
my
pa
pa-Guru
am
om	'om-KE'
ha	'ha-GH', 'ha-NE'
nl	'nl-AW', 'nl-BE', 'nl-BQ', 'nl-CW', 'nl-SR', 'nl-SX'
uk
uz
uz-Latn
yo	'yo-BJ'
ms	'ms-BN', 'ms-SG'
ig
ro	'ro-MD'
mg
ne	'ne-IN'
as
so	'so-DJ', 'so-ET', 'so-KE'
si
km
zu
cs
sv	'sv-AX', 'sv-FI'
hu
el	'el-CY'
sn
kk
rw
ckb	'ckb-IR'
qu	'qu-BO', 'qu-EC'
ak
be
ti	'ti-ER'
az
az-Latn
af	'af-NA'
ca	'ca-AD', 'ca-FR', 'ca-IT'
sr-Latn	'sr-Latn-BA', 'sr-Latn-ME', 'sr-Latn-XK'
ii
he
bg
bm
ki
gsw	'gsw-FR', 'gsw-LI'
sr
sr-Cyrl	'sr-Cyrl-BA', 'sr-Cyrl-ME', 'sr-Cyrl-XK'
ug
zgh
ff	'ff-CM', 'ff-GN', 'ff-MR'
rn
da	'da-GL'
hr	'hr-BA'
sq	'sq-MK', 'sq-XK'
sk
fi
ks
hy
nb	'nb-SJ'
luy
lg
lo
bem
kok
luo
uz-Cyrl
ka
ee	'ee-TG'
mzn
bs-Cyrl
bs
bs-Latn
kln
kam
gl
tzm
dje
kab
bo	'bo-IN'
shi-Latn
shi
shi-Tfng
mn
ln	'ln-AO', 'ln-CF', 'ln-CG'
ky
sg
lt
nyn
guz
cgg
xog
lrc	'lrc-IQ'
mer
lu
sl
teo	'teo-KE'
brx
nd
mk
uz-Arab
mas	'mas-TZ'
nn
kde
mfe
lv
seh
mgh
az-Cyrl
ga
eu
yi
ce
et
ksb
bez
ewo
fy
ebu
nus
ast
asa
ses
os	'os-RU'
br
cy
kea
lag
sah
mt
vun
rof
jmc
lb
dav
dyo
dz
nnh
is
khq
bas
naq
mua
ksh
saq
se	'se-FI', 'se-SE'
dua
rwk
mgo
sbp
to
jgo
ksf
fo	'fo-DK'
gd
kl
rm
fur
agq
haw
chr
hsb
wae
nmg
lkt
twq
dsb
yav
kw
gv
smn
eo
tl

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 JalaliCalendar
  >>> JalaliCalendar(u'جمعه سی ام اسفند ۱۳۸۷').get_date()
  {'date_obj': datetime.datetime(2009, 3, 20, 0, 0), 'period': 'day'}

  >>> 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.

Install using following command to use calendars.

Tip

pip install dateparser[calendars]