dateparser provides modules to easily parse localized dates in almost any string formats commonly found on web pages.

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

• Generic parsing of dates in English, Spanish, Dutch, Russian and over 20 other languages 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'.
• Support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. See Supported Calendars.
• Extensive test coverage.

The most straightforward way is to use the dateparser.parse function, that wraps around most of the functionality in the module.

>>> 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)

>>> 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)

>>> # 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)

For more on date order, please look at Settings.

Dateparser assumes all dates to be in UTC if no timezone is specified in the string. To convert the resultant datetime object to required timezone. You can do the following:

>>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'US/Eastern'}) datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 17, 0)

Support for tzaware objects:

>>> parse('12 Feb 2015 10:56 PM EST', settings={'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True}) datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 13, 3, 56, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

>>> parse('12 Feb 2015 10:56 PM EST', settings={'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True, 'TIMEZONE': None}) datetime.datetime(2015, 2, 12, 22, 56, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>)

For more on timezones, please look at Settings.

>>> 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)

For more on handling incomplete dates, please look at Settings.

dateparser relies on following libraries in some ways:

• dateutil's module relativedelta for its freshness parser.
• ruamel.yaml for reading language and configuration files.
• jdatetime to convert Jalali dates to Gregorian.
• umalqurra to convert Hijri dates to Gregorian.

• 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

• 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'}