python 'x days ago' to datetime

Question

I have strings that show a date in the following format:

x minutes/hours/days/months/years ago

I need to parse that to a datetime using python.

It seems dateutil can't do it.

Is there a way to do it?

Answer 1

Sure you can do it. You just need a timedelta.

s = "3 days ago"
parsed_s = [s.split()[:2]]
time_dict = dict((fmt,float(amount)) for amount,fmt in parsed_s)
dt = datetime.timedelta(**time_dict)
past_time = datetime.datetime.now() - dt

As an aside, it looks like dateutil has a relativedelta which acts like a timedelta, but the constructor also accepts months and years in the arguments (and apparently the arguments need to be integers).