kronosparser

Parse any type of time instance from text and translate it into a date, datetime, or time interval. This could be for either future dates or past dates, and you can set the timezone if available.

This package is based on a grammar defined using pyparsing. If you have any comments feel free to create issues or send pull requests.

Install

In the meantime, while I finish adding this as a pypi package, you can install it by using pip install directly from the Github repository, as shown below,

pip install git+https://github.com/Zapship/kronosparser.git

Usage

To use it you need to import the parse_dates method. There are 3 parameters you can define, besides the input text for your parsing use case:

• future: which states whether you are parsing a text that is supposed to be in the future or the past (particularly helpful for chatbots that asks users questions frame in the past or the future)
• interval_to_date: useful when you have an interval, but you want to just pick a date (usually the closest date).
• timezone: the timezone you want to use for your specific use case.

from kronosparser import parse_dates

Then, you can find all the date or time interval instances within an input string, for example:

>>> from pprint import pprint
>>> from kronosparser import parse_dates
>>> pprint(parse_dates('I need the report now, by tomorrow noon, or next week', interval_to_date=False))
[{'end': 21,
  'parsed': {'datetime': '2020-03-11 14:20:38-07:00'},
  'start': 18,
  'text': 'now'},
 {'end': 39,
  'parsed': {'datetime': '2020-03-12 12:00:00'},
  'start': 26,
  'text': 'tomorrow noon'},
 {'end': 53,
  'parsed': {'interval': {'end': '2020-03-22', 'start': '2020-03-16'}},
  'start': 44,
  'text': 'next week'}]

Note that the example above has 3 types of identified instances: a datetime with timezone, a datetime without timezone, and a time interval.

Other examples:

>>> pprint(parse_dates('I need the report by tomorrow'))
[{'end': 29, 'parsed': {'date': '2020-03-12'}, 'start': 21, 'text': 'tomorrow'}]


>>> pprint(parse_dates('I need the report now, by tomorrow noon, or next week', interval_to_date=False))
{'end': 21,
  'parsed': {'datetime': '2020-03-11 14:22:27-07:00'},
  'start': 18,
  'text': 'now'},
 {'end': 39,
  'parsed': {'datetime': '2020-03-12 12:00:00'},
  'start': 26,
  'text': 'tomorrow noon'},
 {'end': 53,
  'parsed': {'interval': {'end': '2020-03-22', 'start': '2020-03-16'}},
  'start': 44,
  'text': 'next week'}]


>>>  pprint(parse_dates('friday', future=True))
[{'end': 6, 'parsed': {'date': '2020-03-13'}, 'start': 0, 'text': 'friday'}]


>>> pprint(parse_dates('friday', future=False))
[{'end': 6, 'parsed': {'date': '2020-03-06'}, 'start': 0, 'text': 'friday'}]

Note that if you don't define the timezone, it will use US/Pacific by default. Also, if no parameters are specified, it will use future as False and interval_to_date as True.

Development

To contribute, please install the requirements_dev.txt available with the package, modify the code and send a pull request. You can run the unit tests by using nose,

nosetests

Also, I highly encourage to use pylint and yapf for formatting,

yapf -vv -pri ./kronosparser
pylint -j 4 --rcfile=.pylintrc kronosparser/*
isort --apply ./kronosparser

Remember to run this in the tests folder as well. mypy will be added in the future.

Changelog

v0.0.1 (2020-03-06)

• Initial commit with delta_time parser and unit tests.