Introduction to dateparser

Features

• Generic parsing of dates in over 200 language locales plus numerous formats in a language agnostic fashion.
• Generic parsing of relative dates like: '1 min ago', '2 weeks ago', '3 months, 1 week and 1 day ago', 'in 2 days', 'tomorrow'.
• Generic parsing of dates with time zones abbreviations or UTC offsets like: 'August 14, 2015 EST', 'July 4, 2013 PST', '21 July 2013 10:15 pm +0500'.
• Date lookup in longer texts.
• Support for non-Gregorian calendar systems. See Supported Calendars.
• Extensive test coverage.

Basic Usage

The most straightforward way is to use the dateparser.parse function, that wraps around most of the functionality in the module.

> noindex

Popular Formats

> >>> import dateparser >>> > dateparser.parse('12/12/12') datetime.datetime(2012, 12, 12, 0, 0) > >>> dateparser.parse('Fri, 12 Dec 2014 10:55:50') > datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 12, 10, 55, 50) >>> > dateparser.parse('Martes 21 de Octubre de 2014') # Spanish (Tuesday > 21 October 2014) datetime.datetime(2014, 10, 21, 0, 0) >>> > dateparser.parse('Le 11 Décembre 2014 à 09:00') # French (11 December > 2014 at 09:00) datetime.datetime(2014, 12, 11, 9, 0) >>> > dateparser.parse('13 января 2015 г. в 13:34') # Russian (13 January > 2015 at 13:34) datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 13, 13, 34) >>> > dateparser.parse('1 เดือนตุลาคม 2005, 1:00 AM') # Thai (1 October > 2005, 1:00 AM) datetime.datetime(2005, 10, 1, 1, 0)

This will try to parse a date from the given string, attempting to detect the language each time.

You can specify the language(s), if known, using languages argument. In this case, given languages are used and language detection is skipped:

> >>> dateparser.parse('2015, Ago 15, 1:08 pm', > languages=['pt', 'es']) datetime.datetime(2015, 8, 15, 13, 8)

If you know the possible formats of the dates, you can use the date_formats argument:

> >>> dateparser.parse('22 Décembre 2010', date_formats=['%d > %B %Y']) datetime.datetime(2010, 12, 22, 0, 0)

Relative Dates

> >>> parse('1 hour ago') datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 23, 0) > >>> parse('Il ya 2 heures') # French (2 hours ago) > datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 22, 0) >>> parse('1 anno 2 > mesi') # Italian (1 year 2 months) datetime.datetime(2014, 4, 1, 0, > 0) >>> parse('yaklaşık 23 saat önce') # Turkish (23 hours > ago) datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 1, 0) >>> parse('Hace una > semana') # Spanish (a week ago) datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 25, 0, 0) > >>> parse('2小时前') # Chinese (2 hours ago) > datetime.datetime(2015, 5, 31, 22, 0)

OOTB Language Based Date Order Preference

> >>> # parsing ambiguous date >>> > parse('02-03-2016') # assumes english language, uses MDY date order > datetime.datetime(2016, 2, 3, 0, 0) >>> parse('le > 02-03-2016') # detects french, uses DMY date order > datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 2, 0, 0)

For more on date order, please look at settings.

Timezone and UTC Offset

By default, dateparser returns tzaware datetime if timezone is present in date string. Otherwise, it returns a naive datetime object.

> >>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM EST') > datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo > 'EST'>) > > >>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM -0500') > datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo > 'UTC-05:00'>) > > >>> parse('2 hours ago EST') datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, > 15, 55, 39, 579667, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EST'>) > > >>> parse('2 hours ago -0500') datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, > 15, 59, 30, 193431, tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC-05:00'>) > > If date has no timezone name/abbreviation or offset, you can specify > it using TIMEZONE setting. > > >>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': > 'US/Eastern'}) datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0) > > >>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': > '+0500'}) datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0)

TIMEZONE option may not be useful alone as it only attaches given timezone to resultant datetime object. But can be useful in cases where you want conversions from and to different timezones or when simply want a tzaware date with given timezone info attached.

> >>> parse('January 12, 2012 10:00 PM', settings={'TIMEZONE': > 'US/Eastern', 'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True}) > datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 12, 22, 0, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo > 'US/Eastern' EST-1 day, 19:00:00 STD>) > > >>> parse('10:00 am', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'EST', > 'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'}) datetime.datetime(2016, 9, 25, 11, 0)

Some more use cases for conversion of timezones.

> >>> parse('10:00 am EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'EDT'}) > # date string has timezone info datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 12, 11, 0, > tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'EDT'>) > > >>> parse('now EST', settings={'TO_TIMEZONE': 'UTC'}) # > relative dates datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 24, 47, 371823, > tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

In case, no timezone is present in date string or defined in settings. You can still return tzaware datetime. It is especially useful in case of relative dates when uncertain what timezone is relative base.

> >>> parse('2 minutes ago', > settings={'RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE': True}) > datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 11, 4, 25, 24, 152670, tzinfo=<DstTzInfo > 'Asia/Karachi' PKT+5:00:00 STD>)

In case, you want to compute relative dates in UTC instead of default system's local timezone, you can use TIMEZONE setting.

> >>> parse('4 minutes ago', settings={'TIMEZONE': 'UTC'}) > datetime.datetime(2017, 3, 10, 23, 27, 59, 647248, > tzinfo=<StaticTzInfo 'UTC'>)

For more on timezones, please look at settings.

Incomplete Dates

> >>> from dateparser import parse >>> parse('December > 2015') # default behavior datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 16, 0, 0) > >>> parse('December 2015', > settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'last'}) datetime.datetime(2015, > 12, 31, 0, 0) >>> parse('December 2015', > settings={'PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH': 'first'}) datetime.datetime(2015, > 12, 1, 0, 0) > > >>> parse('March') datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 16, 0, 0) > >>> parse('March', settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': > 'future'}) datetime.datetime(2016, 3, 16, 0, 0) >>> # > parsing with preference set for 'past' >>> parse('August', > settings={'PREFER_DATES_FROM': 'past'}) datetime.datetime(2015, 8, > 15, 0, 0) > > >>> import dateparser >>> dateparser.parse("2015") > # default behavior datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 27, 0, 0) >>> > dateparser.parse("2015", settings={"PREFER_MONTH_OF_YEAR": "last"}) > datetime.datetime(2015, 12, 27, 0, 0) >>> > dateparser.parse("2015", settings={"PREFER_MONTH_OF_YEAR": > "first"}) datetime.datetime(2015, 1, 27, 0, 0) >>> > dateparser.parse("2015", settings={"PREFER_MONTH_OF_YEAR": > "current"}) datetime.datetime(2015, 3, 27, 0, 0)

You can also ignore parsing incomplete dates altogether by setting STRICT_PARSING flag as follows:

> >>> parse('December 2015', settings={'STRICT_PARSING': > True}) None

For more on handling incomplete dates, please look at settings.

Search for Dates in Longer Chunks of Text

You can extract dates from longer strings of text. They are returned as list of tuples with text chunk containing the date and parsed datetime object.

> noindex

Advanced Usage

If you need more control over what is being parser check the settings section as well as the using-datedataparser section.

Dependencies

dateparser relies on following libraries in some ways:

> - dateutil's module > relativedelta for its freshness parser. > - convertdate to convert > Jalali dates to Gregorian. > - hijri-converter to > convert Hijri dates to Gregorian. > - tzlocal to reliably get > local timezone. > - ruamel.yaml (optional) > for operations on language files.

Supported languages and locales

You can check the supported locales by visiting the "supported-locales" section.

Supported Calendars

Apart from the Georgian calendar, dateparser supports the Persian Jalali calendar and the Hijri/Islami calendar

To be able to use them you need to install the calendar extra by typing:

> pip install dateparser[calendars]

• Example using the Persian Jalali calendar. For more information, refer to Persian Jalali Calendar.

  > >>> from dateparser.calendars.jalali import > JalaliCalendar >>> JalaliCalendar('جمعه سی ام اسفند > ۱۳۸۷').get_date() DateData(date_obj=datetime.datetime(2009, 3, > 20, 0, 0), period='day', locale=None)

• Example using the Hijri/Islamic Calendar. For more information, refer to Hijri Calendar.

  > >>> from dateparser.calendars.hijri import > HijriCalendar >>> HijriCalendar('17-01-1437 هـ 08:30 > مساءً').get_date() DateData(date_obj=datetime.datetime(2015, 10, > 30, 20, 30), period='day', locale=None)

History

1.2.0 (2023-11-17)

New features:

• New PREFER_MONTH_OF_YEAR setting (#1146)

Fixes:

• Absolute years in Russian are no longer being treated as a number of years in the past (#1129)

Cleanups and internal improvements:

• Removed the use of datetime.utcnow, deprecated on Python 3.12 (#1179)
• Applied Black formatting to the code base (#1158)
• Initial integration with OSSFuzz (#1198)
• Extended test cases (#1191)

1.1.8 (2023-03-22)

Improvements:

• Improved date parsing for Chinese (#1148)
• Improved date parsing for Czech (#1151)
• Reorder language by popularity (#1152)
• Fix leak of memory in cache (#1140)
• Add support for "d units later" (#1154)
• Move modification in CLDR data to yaml (#1153)
• Add support to use timezone via settings to get PREFER_DATES_FROM result (#1155)

1.1.7 (2023-02-02)

Improvements:

• Add an “ago” synonym for Arabic (#1128)
• Improved date parsing for Czech (#1131)
• Improved date parsing for Indonesian (#1134)

1.1.6 (2023-01-12)

Improvements:

• Fix the bug where Monday is parsed as a month (#1121)
• Prevent ReDoS in Spanish sentence splitting regex (#1084)

1.1.5 (2022-12-29)

Improvements:

• Parse short versions of day, month, and year (#1103)
• Add a test for “in 1d” (#1104)
• Update languages_info (#1107)
• Add a workaround for zipimporter not having exec_module before Python 3.10 (#1069)
• Stabilize tests at midnight (#1111)
• Add a test case for French (#1110)

Cleanups:

• Remove the requirements-build file (#1113)

1.1.4 (2022-11-21)

Improvements:

• Improved support for languages such as Slovak, Indonesian, Hindi, German and Japanese (#1064, #1094, #986, #1071, #1068)
• Recursively create a model home (#996)
• Replace regex sub with simple string replace (#1095)
• Add Python 3.10, 3.11 support (#1096)
• Drop support for Python 3.5, 3.6 versions (#1097)

1.1.3 (2022-11-03)

New features:

• Add support for fractional units (#876)

Improvements:

• Fix the returned datetime skipping a day with time+timezone input and PREFER_DATES_FROM = 'future' (#1002)
• Fix input translatation breaking keep_formatting (#720)
• English: support "till date" (#1005)
• English: support “after” and “before” in relative dates (#1008)

Cleanups:

• Reorganize internal data (#1090)
• CI updates (#1088)

1.1.2 (2022-10-20)

Improvements:

• Added support for negative timestamp (#1060)
• Fixed PytzUsageWarning for Python versions >= 3.6 (#1062)
• Added support for dates with dots and spaces (#1028)
• Improved support for Ukrainian, Croatian and Russian (#1072, #1074, #1079, #1082, #1073, #1083)
• Added support for parsing Unix timestamps consistently regardless of timezones (#954)
• Improved tests (#1086)

1.1.1 (2022-03-17)

Improvements:

• Fixed issue with regex library by pinning dependencies to an earlier version (< 2022.3.15, #1046).
• Extended support for Russian language dates starting with lowercase (#999).
• Allowed to use_given_order for languages too (#997).
• Fixed link to settings section (#1018).
• Defined UTF-8 encoding for Windows (#998).
• Fixed directories creation error in CLI utils (#1022).

1.1.0 (2021-10-04)

New features:

• Support language detection based on langdetect, fastText, or a custom implementation (see #932)
• Add support for 'by <time>' (see #839)
• Sort default language list by internet usage (see #805)

Improvements:

• Improved support of Chinese (#910), Czech (#977)
• Improvements in search_dates (see #953)
• Make order of previous locales deterministic (see #851)
• Fix parsing with trailing space (see #841)
• Consider RETURN_TIME_AS_PERIOD for timestamp times (see #922)
• Exclude failing regex version (see #974)
• Ongoing work multithreading support (see #881, #885)
• Add demo URL (see #883)

QA:

• Migrate pipelines from Travis CI to Github Actions (see #859, #879, #884, #886, #911, #966)
• Use versioned CLDR data (see #825)
• Add a script to update table of supported languages and locales (see #601)
• Sort 'skip' keys in yaml files (see #844)
• Improve test coverage (see #827)
• Code cleanup (see #888, #907, #951, #958, #957)

1.0.0 (2020-10-29)

Breaking changes:

• Drop support for Python 2.7 and pypy (see #727, #744, #748, #749, #754, #755, #758, #761, #763, #764, #777 and #783)
• Now DateDataParser.get_date_data() returns a DateData object instead of a dict (see #778).
• From now wrong settings are not silenced and raise SettingValidationError (see #797)
• Now dateparser.parse() is deterministic and doesn't try previous locales. Also, DateDataParser.get_date_data() doesn't try the previous locales by default (see #781)
• Remove the 'base-formats' parser (see #721)
• Extract the 'no-spaces-time' parser from the 'absolute-time' parser and make it an optional parser (see #786)
• Remove numeral_translation_data (see #782)
• Remove the undocumented SKIP_TOKENS_PARSER and FUZZY settings (see #728, #794)
• Remove support for using strings in date_formats (see #726)
• The undocumented ExactLanguageSearch class has been moved to the private scope and some internal methods have changed (see #778)
• Changes in dateparser.utils: normalize_unicode() doesn't accept bytes as input and convert_to_unicode has been deprecated (see #749)

New features:

• Add Python 3.9 support (see #732, #823)
• Detect hours separated with a period/dot (see #741)
• Add support for "decade" (see #762)
• Add support for the hijri calendar in Python ≥ 3.6 (see #718)

Improvements:

• New logo! (see #719)
• Improve the README and docs (see #779, #722)
• Fix the "calendars" extra (see #740)
• Fix leap years when PREFER_DATES_FROM is set (see #738)
• Fix STRICT_PARSING setting in no-spaces-time parser (see #715)
• Consider RETURN_AS_TIME_PERIOD setting for relative-time parser (see #807)
• Parse the 24hr time format with meridian info (see #634)
• Other small improvements (see #698, #709, #710, #712, #730, #731, #735, #739, #784, #788, #795 and #801)

0.7.6 (2020-06-12)

Improvements:

• Rename scripts to dateparser_scripts to avoid name collisions with modules from other packages or projects (see #707)

0.7.5 (2020-06-10)

New features:

• Add Python 3.8 support (see #664)
• Implement a REQUIRE_PARTS setting (see #703)
• Add support for subscript and superscript numbers (see #684)
• Extended French support (see #672)
• Extended German support (see #673)

Improvements:

• Migrate test suite to Pytest (see #662)
• Add test to check the yaml and json files content (see #663 and #692)
• Add flake8 pipeline with pytest-flake8 (see #665)
• Add partial support for 8-digit dates without separators (see #639)
• Fix possible OverflowError errors and explicitly avoid to raise ValueError when parsing relative dates (see #686)
• Fix double-digit GMT and UTC parsing (see #632)
• Fix bug when using DATE_ORDER (see #628)
• Fix bug when parsing relative time with timezone (see #503)
• Fix milliseconds parsing (see #572 and #661)
• Fix wrong values to be interpreted as 'future' in PREFER_DATES_FROM (see #629)
• Other small improvements (see #667, #675, #511, #626, #512, #509, #696, #702 and #699)

0.7.4 (2020-03-06)

New features:

• Extended Norwegian support (see #598)
• Implement a PARSERS setting (see #603)

Improvements:

• Add support for PREFER_DATES_FROM in relative/freshness parser (see #414)
• Add support for PREFER_DAY_OF_MONTH in base-formats parser (see #611)
• Added UTC -00:00 as a valid offset (see #574)
• Fix support for “one” (see #593)
• Fix TypeError when parsing some invalid dates (see #536)
• Fix tokenizer for non recognized characters (see #622)
• Prevent installing regex 2019.02.19 (see #600)
• Resolve DeprecationWarning related to raw string escape sequences (see #596)
• Implement a tox environment to build the documentation (see #604)
• Improve tests stability (see #591, #605)
• Documentation improvements (see #510, #578, #619, #614, #620)
• Performance improvements (see #570, #569, #625)

0.7.3 (2020-03-06)

• Broken version

0.7.2 (2019-09-17)

Features:

• Extended Czech support
• Added time to valid periods
• Added timezone information to dates found with search_dates()
• Support strings as date formats

Improvements:

• Fixed Collections ABCs depreciation warning
• Fixed dates with trailing colons not being parsed
• Fixed date format override on any settings change
• Fixed parsing current weekday as past date, regardless of settings
• Added UTC -2:30 as a valid offset
• Added Python 3.7 to supported versions, dropped support for Python 3.3 and 3.4
• Moved to importlib from imp where possible
• Improved support for Catalan
• Documentation improvements

0.7.1 (2019-02-12)

Features/news:

• Added detected language to return value of search_dates()
• Performance improvements
• Refreshed versions of dependencies

Improvements:

• Fixed unpickleable DateTime objects with timezones
• Fixed regex pattern to avoid new behaviour of re.split in Python 3.7
• Fixed an exception thrown when parsing colons
• Fixed tests failing on days with number greater than 30
• Fixed ZeroDivisionError exceptions

0.7.0 (2018-02-08)

Features added during Google Summer of Code 2017:

• Harvesting language data from Unicode CLDR database (), which includes over 200 locales (#321) - authored by Sarthak Maddan. See full currently supported locale list in README.
• Extracting dates from longer strings of text (#324) - authored by Elena Zakharova. Special thanks for their awesome contributions!

New features:

• Added (independently from CLDR) Georgian (#308) and Swedish (#305)

Improvements:

• Improved support of Chinese (#359), Thai (#345), French (#301, #304), Russian (#302)
• Removed ruamel.yaml from dependencies (#374). This should reduce the number of installation issues and improve performance as the result of moving away from YAML as basic data storage format. Note that YAML is still used as format for support language files.
• Improved performance through using pre-compiling frequent regexes and lazy loading of data (#293, #294, #295, #315)
• Extended tests (#316, #317, #318, #323)
• Updated nose_parameterized to its current package, parameterized (#381)

Planned for next release:

• Full language and locale names
• Performance and stability improvements
• Documentation improvements

0.6.0 (2017-03-13)

New features:

• Consistent parsing in terms of true python representation of date string. See #281
• Added support for Bangla, Bulgarian and Hindi languages.

Improvements:

• Major bug fixes related to parser and system's locale. See #277, #282
• Type check for timezone arguments in settings. see #267
• Pinned dependencies' versions in requirements. See #265
• Improved support for cn, es, dutch languages. See #274, #272, #285

Packaging:

• Make calendars extras to be used at the time of installation if need to use calendars feature.

0.5.1 (2016-12-18)

New features:

• Added support for Hebrew

Improvements:

• Safer loading of YAML. See #251
• Better timezone parsing for freshness dates. See #256
• Pinned dependencies' versions in requirements. See #265
• Improved support for zh, fi languages. See #249, #250, #248, #244

0.5.0 (2016-09-26)

New features:

• DateDataParser now also returns detected language in the result dictionary.
• Explicit and lucid timezone conversion for a given datestring using TIMEZONE, TO_TIMEZONE settings.
• Added Hungarian language.
• Added setting, STRICT_PARSING to ignore incomplete dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed quite a few parser bugs reported in issues #219, #222, #207, #224.
• Improved support for chinese language.
• Consistent interface for both Jalali and Hijri parsers.

0.4.0 (2016-06-17)

New features:

• Support for Language based date order preference while parsing ambiguous dates.
• Support for parsing dates with no spaces in between components.
• Support for custom date order preference using settings.
• Support for parsing generic relative dates in future.e.g. "tomorrow", "in two weeks", etc.
• Added RELATIVE_BASE settings to set date context to any datetime in past or future.
• Replaced dateutil.parser.parse with dateparser's own parser.

Improvements:

• Added simplifications for "12 noon" and "12 midnight".
• Fixed several bugs
• Replaced PyYAML library by its active fork ruamel.yaml which also fixed the issues with installation on windows using python35.
• More predictable date_formats handling.

0.3.5 (2016-04-27)

New features:

• Danish language support.
• Japanese language support.
• Support for parsing date strings with accents.

Improvements:

• Transformed languages.yaml into base file and separate files for each language.
• Fixed vietnamese language simplifications.
• No more version restrictions for python-dateutil.
• Timezone parsing improvements.
• Fixed test environments.
• Cleaned language codes. Now we strictly follow codes as in ISO 639-1.
• Improved chinese dates parsing.

0.3.4 (2016-03-03)

Improvements:

• Fixed broken version 0.3.3 by excluding latest python-dateutil version.

0.3.3 (2016-02-29)

New features:

• Finnish language support.

Improvements:

• Faster parsing with switching to regex module.
• RETURN_AS_TIMEZONE_AWARE setting to return tz aware date object.
• Fixed conflicts with month/weekday names similarity across languages.

0.3.2 (2016-01-25)

New features:

• Added Hijri Calendar support.
• Added settings for better control over parsing dates.
• Support to convert parsed time to the given timezone for both complete and relative dates.

Improvements:

• Fixed problem with caching datetime.now in FreshnessDateDataParser.
• Added month names and week day names abbreviations to several languages.
• More simplifications for Russian and Ukrainian languages.
• Fixed problem with parsing time component of date strings with several kinds of apostrophes.

0.3.1 (2015-10-28)

New features:

• Support for Jalali Calendar.
• Belarusian language support.
• Indonesian language support.

Improvements:

• Extended support for Russian and Polish.
• Fixed bug with time zone recognition.
• Fixed bug with incorrect translation of "second" for Portuguese.

0.3.0 (2015-07-29)

New features:

• Compatibility with Python 3 and PyPy.

Improvements:

• languages.yaml data cleaned up to make it human-readable.
• Improved Spanish date parsing.

0.2.1 (2015-07-13)

• Support for generic parsing of dates with UTC offset.
• Support for Tagalog/Filipino dates.
• Improved support for French and Spanish dates.

0.2.0 (2015-06-17)

• Easy to use parse function
• Languages definitions using YAML.
• Using translation based approach for parsing non-english languages. Previously, dateutil.parserinfo was used for language definitions.
• Better period extraction.
• Improved tests.
• Added a number of new simplifications for more comprehensive generic parsing.
• Improved validation for dates.
• Support for Polish, Thai and Arabic dates.
• Support for pytz timezones.
• Fixed building and packaging issues.

0.1.0 (2014-11-24)

• First release on PyPI.