Python Smart date parsing without a year specified

Question

How can I parse dates (with dateutil) without a year so that when the current date is 17/11/2012 these dates will be parsed like this:

print parser.parse("23 nov", dayfirst=True, yearfirst=False, fuzzy=True)
# 23/11/2012
print parser.parse("28 dec", dayfirst=True, yearfirst=False, fuzzy=True)
# 28/12/2012
print parser.parse("3 jan", dayfirst=True, yearfirst=False, fuzzy=True)
# 3/01/2013

What I want is that already passed months will be in the year that follows the current year. Is there any easy solution for this?

Answer 1

To find future dates automatically:

from dateutil import parser
from dateutil.relativedelta import relativedelta

def parse_future(timestr, default, **parse_kwargs):
    """Same as dateutil.parser.parse() but only returns future dates."""
    now = default
    for _ in range(401):  # assume gregorian calendar repeats every 400 year
        try:
            dt = parser.parse(timestr, default=default, **parse_kwargs)
        except ValueError:
            pass
        else:
            if dt > now: # found future date
                break
        default += relativedelta(years=+1)
    else: # future date not found
        raise ValueError('failed to find future date for %r' % (timestr,))
    return dt

Example

from datetime import datetime

for timestr in ["23 nov", "28 dec", "3 jan", "29 feb"]:
    print parse_future(timestr, default=datetime(2012, 11, 17)).date()

Output

2012-11-23
2012-12-28
2013-01-03
2016-02-29

Note: "29 feb" is translated to "2016-02-29".