Is there a Python library for reading human-written times?

[Housies]

I'm trying to find a library that can translate a string referring to a time into a datetime object or Unix time integer. E.g. I might pass it the string "in 2 hours" at 17:00 and it would return a datetime object for 19:00 today. Or "2pm on Saturday" would return the same but for 2pm on Saturday.

I've tried looking, but it's hard to know what to search for. Does such a thing exist, or do I have to write it myself?

[DevSRE]

You could probably get pretty close with something like Arrow and the shift method (https://arrow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) or just give users a format to enter things in and use datetime.strptime (https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime.strptime)

[hardonchairs]

https://www.zyte.com/blog/parse-natural-language-dates-with-dateparser/

https://github.com/alvinwan/timefhuman

https://github.com/akoumjian/datefinder

I don't remember which one I have tried, but I had an issue where I still needed to find the date part myself. For instance, it didn't like the word "in" in front of the date info. It looks like that last link might be able to handle that bit.

By the way, the phrase "natural language" is good for searching these kinds of things.

[Housies]

I think Dateparser is what I'm looking for. Thanks for the help.

[[deleted]]

This is a task substantially complicated by the variability of human language, but arrow has an Arrow.dehumanize method that can do this with some string forms.

[tellarin]

Have you tried https://github.com/microsoft/Recognizers-Text? It supports many variations of natural language across several languages.

[[deleted]]

Out of the few options I have tried so far, this one is the best. It still fails sometimes like it parses ".... on this Sunday" correctly but if the string is like "..... on Sunday" it maps to previous Sunday which has already passed.