Date Parsing Question

[David Bolen]

Gavin <gavin.das1 at gmail.com> writes:

> python-dateutil seems to work very well if everything is in English,
> however, it does not seem to work for other languages and the
> documentation does not seem to have any information about locale
> support.

Probably because I don't think there is much built in.  You'll want to
supply your own parserinfo to the parse function.  I haven't had to
parse non-english localized date strings myself yet, but yes, the
default parserinfo used by the module is in English.

Looks like the docs don't get into it too much, but if you review the
parser.py source in the package you can see the default parserinfo
definition.

I would think defining your own (or subclass of the default) and
replacing the WEEKDAYS and MONTHS values would work (you can get
localized lists directly from the calendar module) and maybe adding to
the jump table if you want to parser longer phrases.  At a first
glance, the lexer within the module does seem like there may be some
possible issues with more esoteric encodings or unicode, but just
something to stay aware of.

If you already have a i18n/l10n setup in your application (or need to
have finer grained control than a global locale setting), you could
instead override the lookup methods, though there's a bit more work to
do since the initial lookup tables will probably need to be created in
each of the locales you may wish to switch between.

-- David