[Baypiggies] custom date parser

[Anna Ravenscroft]

The dateutil module has a great fuzzy parser that lets you do all this.

On Wed, Sep 3, 2008 at 10:12 AM, Aaron Maxwell <amax at redsymbol.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Below is a function that parses a date string in the form "YYYY-MM-DD"
> and returns a datetime.date object, or None if it's bad input and
> cannot be converted.  However, it does a couple of special tricks.
> The data in certain cases is known to have a value for the day or
> month that is not in the valid range; e.g., it may be 2007-11-31
> (November traditionally only has 30 days), or 2002-14-23.  In this
> situation, I want to keep the most signficant good field(s) and set
> the lessors to 1, then return the date object from that - so the
> results of the above would be date(2007, 11, 1) or date(2002, 1, 1)
> respectively.
>
> The function below does this.  It uses a triply-nested try/except
> block, and I can't shake the feeling that there is a shorter and
> clearer implementation.  Any thoughts?
>
> Of course, one approach would be to manually check that the month and
> day field before passing them to datetime.date.  I would rather reuse
> the validation code in the date class, though, for obvious reasons.
>
> Thanks in advance,
> Aaron
>
> {{{
> import datetime
> def parse_datefield(raw_pubdate):
>    '''
>    Parse a datefield
>    Takes in a date string in the format YYYY-MM-DD.
>    Returns a datetime.date object.
>    '''
>    # ... imagine validation/error checking code here ...
>    parts = map(int, raw_pubdate.split('-'))
>    try:
>        d = datetime.date(*parts)
>    except ValueError:
>        # day out of range?
>        parts[-1] = 1
>        try:
>            d = datetime.date(*parts)
>        except ValueError:
>            # month out of range?
>            parts[-2] = 1
>            try:
>                d = datetime.date(*parts)
>            except ValueError:
>                # give up
>                d = None
>    return d
> }}}
>
> --
> Aaron Maxwell
> http://redsymbol.net
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-- 
cordially,
Anna
--
Walking through the water. Trying to get across.
Just like everybody else.
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