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?
Answers:
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Method 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
Method 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
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