[Chandler-dev] Natural Language date Parsing

[John Anderson]

Hi Mike:

I suggested to Darshana that she do a quick survey of existing packages 
and I think this was one of the candidates.

John

Mike Taylor wrote:
>
> On Jun 27, 2006, at 2:02 PM, Darshana Chhajed wrote:
>
>> Hi John,
>> I went through the dateutil package which I found on the web. the 
>> link is 
>> http://labix.org/python-dateutil#head-42a94eedcff96da7fb1f77096b5a3b519c859ba9 
>>
>> This does not understand natural language.
>>
>> They use the following command to get the same date of the Next Month :
>>>>> NOW+relativedelta(months=+1)
>> The output is in the datetime format.
>> And the program on date parsing which Bear has already done, takes 
>> the command
>>>>> cal.parse("next month")
>> The output is in seconds from the sourcetime(which can be specified 
>> or is assumed to be the current datetime otherwise).Currently this 
>> program is not complete and accurate. I am working on it.
>
> Do you have any other issues besides the one text string it's not 
> parsing that you told me about last week?
>
>> Now , what we require for NL date parsing is to be able to take the 
>> natural language input (like Bear's code) and give the output in 
>> datetime(like dateutil package)
>>
>> So I was thinking to write a wrapper around the dateutil which help 
>> me use it the way we want to.
>> is it the right approach? Other suggestions are welcome.
>
> Why not just ask me to alter the API of mine so it returns the date 
> value you need?  Converting the raw internal date value to another 
> format is just a matter of finding out what formats you require. :)
>
> Is something in how my parser works causing you some grief?  Let me 
> know and I can change it.  Right now your the first user of my code 
> (except for me) so you have my full attention :)
>
> ---
> Bear
>
> Build and Release Engineer
> Open Source Applications Foundation (OSAF)
> bear at osafoundation.org
> http://www.osafoundation.org
>
> bear at code-bear.com
> http://code-bear.com
>
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>
>