The beautiful brand new cookbook2 has "Fuzzy parsing of Dates" using dateutil.parser, which you run once you have a decent guess at locale (page 127 of cookbook)
John Roth wrote: > "Thomas W" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > I'm developing a web-application where the user sometimes has to enter > > dates in plain text, allthough a format may be provided to give clues. > > On the server side this piece of text has to be parsed into a datetime > > python-object. Does anybody have any pointers on this? > > > > Besides the actual parsing, my main concern is the different locale > > date formats and how to be able to parse those strange us-like > > "month/day/year" compared to the clever and intuitive european-style > > "day/month/year" etc. > > > > I've searched google, but haven't found any good referances that helped > > me solve this problem, especially with regards to the locale date > > format issues. > > There is no easy answer if you want to be able to enter three > numbers. There are two answers that work, although there will > be a lot of complaining. One is to use the international yyyy-mm-dd > form, and the other is to accept a 4 digit year, an alphabetic month > and a two digit day in any order. > > Otherwise, if you get 4 digits as the first component, and it passes your > validation (whatever that is) for reasonable years, you're probably > pretty safe to assume that you've got yyyy-mm-dd. Otherwise > if you can't get a clean answser (one is > 31, one is 12 < x < 32 > and one is <= 12, just give them a list of possibilities and politely > suggest that they enter it as yyyy-mm-dd next time. > > I don't validate separators. As long as there is something that isn't a > number or a letter, it's a separator and which one doesn't matter. At > times I've even taken the transition between a digit and a letter as > a separator. > > John Roth > > > Best regards, > > Thomas > > -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
