Intelligent Date & Time parsing

[shakefu at gmail.com]

On Mar 7, 4:33 pm, Carl Banks <pavlovevide... at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mar 7, 5:08 pm, shak... at gmail.com wrote:
>
> > I'm new to python and I was wondering if there are any intelligent
> > date/time parsing modules out there. I've looked at strptime (or
> > whichever it is) and mxDateTime from the eGenix package. I need
> > something to parse user input for a django app, and it's awesome to be
> > able to write "last monday", "a year ago", or "10pm tuesday" like
> > PHP's strtotime.
>
> > So are there any modules that allow for that kind of parsing?
>
> GNU date can do a lot of these things--if your Django server is
> running Linux it probably has GNU date installed.  (Might not be
> practical to start a new process in the middle of a query, especially
> a lot of them.)
>
> From a shell command line, get the current time (in seconds since
> epoch, which you can pass to Python time functions) this way:
>
> date +"%s.%N"
>
> And you can enter all sort of relative and absolute date strings:
>
> date +"%s.%N" --date='last monday'
> date +"%s.%N" --date='a year ago'
> date +"%s.%N" --date='10pm tuesday'
>
> These all apparently work.  Now all you have to do is call it from
> Python using subprocess module and you're set.  (DO NOT use os.system
> for this since it starts a shell process, which is unnecessarily slow,
> and dangerous when passed user input.)
>
> Carl Banks

Super sweet! I didn't even know you could do craziness like that in
python. Thanks for the advice!