Reverse pretty date format

Question

Is there a way to go from

"1 day ago", "1 week ago", "3 hours ago"

to some date format like "Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:00:00" using Python?

possible duplicate of [Chronic (Ruby NLP date/time parser) for python?](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/719088/chronic-ruby-nlp-date-time-parser-for-python) — Wooble, Jul 20 '11 at 17:52

score 4 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

4

The answer to this question suggests http://code.google.com/p/parsedatetime/

edited May 23 '17 at 12:04

Community

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answered Jul 20 '11 at 17:07

philnash

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score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jul 20 '11 at 20:07

This example on the pyparsing wiki supports these 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
in 2 weeks
in 3 days at 5pm
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
2pm next Sunday
next Sunday at 2pm

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jul 20 '11 at 17:17

I don't know whether there are libraries available (if there are, I'm sure they can be found in Django source code - it sounds like the kind of problems they must have thought of).

However, I don't find the problem too difficult in principle. You first define your boundaries. For example:

If it happened within one day, I'll spell out the hour
If it happened within six days, I'll spell out the number of days
If it happened within four weeks, I'll spell out the number of weeks
[etc]

Then you use the datetime module (specifically the timedelta object) and filter out your desires according to the duration. A basic version should be up an running in less than an hour.

Again - I encourage you to look for implemented solutions, but if you cannot figure out a basic way to get this working, I'm afraid your Python skills may be lacking and you may want to practice by reinventing the wheel.

Reverse pretty date format

3 Answers3