[python] Extracting date from a string in Python

How can I extract the date from a string like "monkey 2010-07-10 love banana"? Thanks!

Using python-dateutil:

In [1]: import dateutil.parser as dparser

In [18]: dparser.parse("monkey 2010-07-10 love banana",fuzzy=True)
Out[18]: datetime.datetime(2010, 7, 10, 0, 0)

Invalid dates raise a ValueError:

In [19]: dparser.parse("monkey 2010-07-32 love banana",fuzzy=True)
# ValueError: day is out of range for month

It can recognize dates in many formats:

In [20]: dparser.parse("monkey 20/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True)
Out[20]: datetime.datetime(1980, 1, 20, 0, 0)

Note that it makes a guess if the date is ambiguous:

In [23]: dparser.parse("monkey 10/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True)
Out[23]: datetime.datetime(1980, 10, 1, 0, 0)

But the way it parses ambiguous dates is customizable:

In [21]: dparser.parse("monkey 10/01/1980 love banana",fuzzy=True, dayfirst=True)
Out[21]: datetime.datetime(1980, 1, 10, 0, 0)

If you know the position of the date object in the string (for example in a log file), you can use .split()[index] to extract the date without fully knowing the format.

For example:

>>> string = 'monkey 2010-07-10 love banana'
>>> date = string.split()[1]
>>> date
'2010-07-10'

Using Pygrok, you can define abstracted extensions to the Regular Expression syntax.

The custom patterns can be included in your regex in the format %{PATTERN_NAME}.

You can also create a label for that pattern, by separating with a colon: %s{PATTERN_NAME:matched_string}. If the pattern matches, the value will be returned as part of the resulting dictionary (e.g. result.get('matched_string'))

For example:

from pygrok import Grok

input_string = 'monkey 2010-07-10 love banana'
date_pattern = '%{YEAR:year}-%{MONTHNUM:month}-%{MONTHDAY:day}'

grok = Grok(date_pattern)
print(grok.match(input_string))

The resulting value will be a dictionary:

{'month': '07', 'day': '10', 'year': '2010'}

If the date_pattern does not exist in the input_string, the return value will be None. By contrast, if your pattern does not have any labels, it will return an empty dictionary {}

References:

• pygrok (Github)
• pygrok Preinstalled Definitions (Github)

For extracting the date from a string in Python; the best module available is the datefinder module.

You can use it in your Python project by following the easy steps given below.

Step 1: Install datefinder Package

pip install datefinder

Step 2: Use It In Your Project

import datefinder

input_string = "monkey 2010-07-10 love banana"
# a generator will be returned by the datefinder module. I'm typecasting it to a list. Please read the note of caution provided at the bottom.
matches = list(datefinder.find_dates(input_string))

if len(matches) > 0:
    # date returned will be a datetime.datetime object. here we are only using the first match.
    date = matches[0]
    print date
else:
    print 'No dates found'

note: if you are expecting a large number of matches; then typecasting to list won't be a recommended way as it will be having a big performance overhead.

You could also try the dateparser module, which may be slower than datefinder on free text but which should cover more potential cases and date formats, as well as a significant number of languages.