The following date patterns
1st January
30th April
are easily parsed into instances of datetime.date
via dateutil.parser.parse()
:
In [1]:from dateutil.parser import parse
In [2]: parse('1st January')
Out[2]: datetime.datetime(2012, 1, 1, 0, 0)
In [3]: parse('8th April')
Out[3]: datetime.datetime(2012, 4, 30, 0, 0)
How can a future date be returned from parsing?
I.e. parsing '1st January'
would return datetime.datetime(2013, 1, 1, 0, 0)
, 1st January 2013 and not 1st January 2012. Any elegant solution?
Starting with mensi's excellent answer to your previous question, here's a solution that takes dates without a specified year and makes sure they're not in the past. If the year is given as part of the string it is kept intact.
import datetime
import dateutil
def parse(date_string):
result = dateutil.parser.parse(date_string, default=datetime.datetime(1581, 1, 1))
if result.year == 1581:
now = datetime.datetime.now()
result = result.replace(year=now.year)
if result < now:
result = result.replace(year=now.year + 1)
return result
parse('8th April')