Using dateutil.parser to parse a date in another language

Question

Dateutil is a great tool for parsing dates in string format. for example

from dateutil.parser import parse
parse(\"Tue, 01 Oct 2013 14:26:00 -0300\")
         


        

Answer 1

I think the best solution is to subclass the parser from dateutil and use the calendar lib constants. This is a simple solution, I didn't test it a lot, so use with caution.

It is very simple and will localize dateutil for a lot of languages. Create a module localeparseinfo.py:

import calendar
from dateutil import parser
    
class LocaleParserInfo(parser.parserinfo):
    WEEKDAYS = zip(calendar.day_abbr, calendar.day_name)
    MONTHS = list(zip(calendar.month_abbr, calendar.month_name))[1:]

Now you can use your new parseinfo object as a parameter to dateutil.parser.

In [1]: import locale;locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, "pt_BR.utf8")
In [2]: from localeparserinfo import LocaleParserInfo                                   

In [3]: from dateutil.parser import parse                                                

In [4]: parse("Ter, 01 Out 2013 14:26:00 -0300", parserinfo=PtParserInfo())              
Out[4]: datetime.datetime(2013, 10, 1, 14, 26, tzinfo=tzoffset(None, -10800))

Look that this solves a lot of different language parse, but it is an incomplete solution for all possible dates and times. Take a look at dateutil parser.py, specially the parserinfo class variables. Take a look at HMS variable and others.

You can even pass the locale string as an argument to your parserinfo class.