How to parse unicode month name to get datetime in Python 2.7

Question

I have a u'20 січня 2012' and I need to get datetime object. (u'20 січня 2012' == u'20 January 2012')

It's very easy when you have a datetime.strptime('1 Jun 2005', '%d %b %Y') But what to do if I have month in different locale ?

(appengine + python 2.7)

It would be good to have a method get_month(u'Month name in different forms', Language.RUS) -> int:'number of month' So the library could process different forms of month name. For example '1 Июнь' and '1 Июня' should be the same date. I'm using it for crawling websites and parsing date.

Answer 1

Maybe you can convert it to a datetime object first, then use locale to set another locale and convert it again..

Here is something to get you starting..

import locale, datetime

In [1]: datetime.datetime.strptime('February', '%B')
Out[1]: datetime.datetime(1900, 2, 1, 0, 0)

In [2]: locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'de_DE')
Out[2]: 'de_DE'

In [3]: datetime.date(2008, 2, 1).strftime('%B')
Out[3]: 'Februar'

In [4]: datetime.datetime.strptime('Februar', '%B')
Out[4]: datetime.datetime(1900, 2, 1, 0, 0)

Answer 2

There is one good solution to use python_dateutil parse method and implement a parserinfo class for a given language.

http://blog.elsdoerfer.name/2009/12/12/django-flexible-date-form-fields-accepting-almost-any-input/