Smart date interpretation [closed]

Question

I can't remember which application I was using, but I do recall it having really neat date parsing/interpretation.

For example, you could type in 'two days ago' or 'tomorrow' and it would understand.

Any libraries to suggest? Bonus points if usable from Python.

Answer 1

Perhaps you are thinking of PHP's strtotime() function, the Swiss Army Knife of date parsing:

Man, what did I do before strtotime(). Oh, I know, I had a 482 line function to parse date formats and return timestamps. And I still could not do really cool stuff. Like tonight I needed to figure out when Thanksgiving was in the US. I knew it was the 4th Thursday in November. So, I started with some math stuff and checking what day of the week Nov. 1 would fall on. All that was making my head hurt. So, I just tried this for fun.

strtotime("thursday, november ".date("Y")." + 3 weeks")

That gives me Thanksgiving. Awesome.

Sadly, there does not appear to be a Python equivalent. The closest thing I could find is the dateutil.parser module.