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Does anyone know of a library - ideally Python, that can have a stab at pulling dates out of text?

"Shall we go to the library today" -> 21 Jan 10 "Starting on the 1st of January" -> 1 Jan 10 "Anytime between 3nd and 5th of Feb 2009" -> 3 Feb 09, 5 Feb 09

It's a tough problem and probably why I havn't found anything! Already using NLTK by the way if that helps.

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  • Not that I know of any, but does it need to be international or US only? US only could be done with a set of regexes but internationalreally increases the amount of regexes :( Commented Jan 21, 2010 at 12:11
  • dupe: stackoverflow.com/questions/1258712/… and stackoverflow.com/questions/1822787/… among many others Commented Jan 21, 2010 at 12:17
  • fuzzy is a good search term. Following suggested threads above found this, stackoverflow.com/questions/1258712/… which looks promising. And yes, international is required sigh. Commented Jan 21, 2010 at 12:28
  • These answers indeed parse strings related to time, but don't help with extracting time phrases from free text. Commented Jan 21, 2010 at 12:53

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Looks like this module is what you are looking for: parsedatetime

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You'll probably have to tokenize your lines before moving them to the parser.
Should have added to question - have been trying with this but it is easily fooled and then you have the problem of working out if the result is valid! Thanks for suggestion though.
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The PyParsing site has a little bonus script for parsing time expressions. I would say that is worth a look for you!

Edit: I see you already ended up there as I was typing my suggestion. Good luck to you!

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Thanks for the contributions - in the end I followed up one of the comments, that led to pyparsing, which led to the beginnings of a solution. many thanks all.

Have posted the work in progress, two pyparsing snippets of code here http://pbjots.blogspot.com/2010/01/using-pyparsing-to-extract-dates-from.html in case they help anyone.

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