Parsing text into dates?

[gene.tani at gmail.com]

The beautiful brand new cookbook2 has "Fuzzy parsing of Dates" using
dateutil.parser, which you run once you have a decent guess at locale
(page 127 of cookbook)

John Roth wrote:
> "Thomas W" <thomas.weholt at gmail.com> wrote in message
> news:1116277171.492587.38080 at g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> > I'm developing a web-application where the user sometimes has to
enter
> > dates in plain text, allthough a format may be provided to give
clues.
> > On the server side this piece of text has to be parsed into a
datetime
> > python-object. Does anybody have any pointers on this?
> >
> > Besides the actual parsing, my main concern is the different locale
> > date formats and how to be able to parse those strange us-like
> > "month/day/year" compared to the clever and intuitive
european-style
> > "day/month/year" etc.
> >
> > I've searched google, but haven't found any good referances that
helped
> > me solve this problem, especially with regards to the locale date
> > format issues.
>
> There is no easy answer if you want to be able to enter three
> numbers. There are two answers that work, although there will
> be a lot of complaining. One is to use the international yyyy-mm-dd
> form, and the other is to accept a 4 digit year, an alphabetic month
> and a two digit day in any order.
>
> Otherwise, if you get 4 digits as the first component, and it passes
your
> validation (whatever that is) for reasonable years, you're probably
> pretty safe to assume that you've got yyyy-mm-dd. Otherwise
> if you can't get a clean answser (one is > 31, one is 12 < x < 32
> and one is <= 12, just give them a list of possibilities and politely
> suggest that they enter it as yyyy-mm-dd next time.
>
> I don't validate separators. As long as there is something that isn't
a
> number or a letter, it's a separator and which one doesn't matter. At
> times I've even taken the transition between a digit and a letter as
> a separator.
> 
> John  Roth
> 
> > Best regards,
> > Thomas
> >