问题:

I'm trying to figure out how to extract dates from unstructured text using Ruby.

For example, I'd like to parse the date out of this string "Applications started after 12:00 A.M. Midnight (EST) February 1, 2010 will not be considered."

Any suggestions?

回答1:

Assuming you just want dates and not datetimes:

require 'date'
string = "Applications started after 12:00 A.M. Midnight (EST) February 1, 2010 will not be considered."
r = /(January|February|March|April|May|June|July|August|September|October|November|December) (\d+{1,2}), (\d{4})/
if string[r]
  date =Date.parse(string[r])
  puts date
end

回答2:

Try Chronic (http://chronic.rubyforge.org/) it might be able to parse that otherwise you're going to have to use Date.strptime.

回答3:

Also you can try a gem that can help find date in string.

Exapmle:

input = 'circa 1960 and full date 07 Jun 1941'
dates_from_string = DatesFromString.new
dates_from_string.get_structure(input)

#=> return
# [{:type=>:year, :value=>"1960", :distance=>4, :key_words=>[]},
# {:type=>:day, :value=>"07", :distance=>1, :key_words=>[]},
# {:type=>:month, :value=>"06", :distance=>1, :key_words=>[]},
# {:type=>:year, :value=>"1941", :distance=>0, :key_words=>[]}]