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?

The command `date` can accept some human-readable dates on Linux: `date --date='8:30am next monday` — Flimm, Jul 14 '23 at 23:05

score 53 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 18 '15 at 11:56

53

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

edited Oct 18 '15 at 11:56

jfs

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answered Sep 30 '09 at 00:06

Alex Barrett

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Indeed, it's a great library. Coding example + logged bug found [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/30224711/605356) -- apparently a few kinks to work out for parsedatetime version 1.4. – Johnny Utahh May 14 '15 at 19:23
1

Is the "moday" a mistake or a deliberate mis-spell? – Meet Taraviya Mar 18 '17 at 15:03
@MeetTaraviya - Ask the person who edited my answer 6 years later :P – Alex Barrett Mar 18 '17 at 23:54
I get a `No module named 'parsedatetime'` even after installing `parsedatetime` with `pip` – Cyzanfar May 06 '18 at 14:13
When I got the same error message as @Cyzanfar, I was able to fix it by changing the first line of the script to `#!/usr/bin/env python3`. – NSSynapse Mar 24 '22 at 17:42

PaulMcG · Answer 2 · 2009-10-01T03:54:46.343

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

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

2 Answers2

Output

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