Question

I’m looking for a Python module that would take an arbitrary block of text, search it for something that looks like a date string, and build a DateTime object out of it. Something like Date::Extract in Perl

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

The nearest equivalent is probably the dateutil module. Usage is:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse >>> parse('Wed, Nov 12') datetime.datetime(2008, 11, 12, 0, 0) 

Using the fuzzy parameter should ignore extraneous text. ie

>>> parse('the date was the 1st of December 2006 2:30pm', fuzzy=True) datetime.datetime(2006, 12, 1, 14, 30)