Handling The Different Results From Parsedatetime

I'm trying to learn python after spending the last 15 or so years working only in Perl and only occasionally. I can't understand how to handle the two different kinds of results fr

Solution 1:

I know this is an old question but I ran into this yesterday and the answer here is incomplete (it will fail in the case that parse() returns a datetime).

From the parsedatetime docs:

parse() returns a tuple ( result, type ) where type specifies one of:

   0 = not parsed at all
   1 = parsed as a date (of type struct_time)
   2 = parsed as a time (of type struct_time)
   3 = parsed as a datetime (of type datetime.datetime)

Which is a little weird and maybe not the clearest way to do it, but it works and is pretty useful.

Here's a little chunk of code that will convert whatever it returns to a proper python datetime:

import parsedatetime.parsedatetime as pdt

def datetimeFromString( s ):

    c = pdt.Calendar()
    result, what = c.parse( s )

    dt = None

    # what was returned (see http://code-bear.com/code/parsedatetime/docs/)
    # 0 = failed to parse
    # 1 = date (with current time, as a struct_time)
    # 2 = time (with current date, as a struct_time)
    # 3 = datetime
    if what in (1,2):
        # result is struct_time
        dt = datetime.datetime( *result[:6] )
    elif what == 3:
        # result is a datetime
        dt = result

    if dt is None:
        # Failed to parse
        raise ValueError, ("Don't understand date '"+s+"'")

    return dt

Solution 2:

Use x = time.struct_time(result[0]) and you'll get a struct_time (so that you can check x.tm_mon and x.tm_mday) no matter whether that result[0] is a struct_time itself, or just a 9-tuple (I've never heard of parsedatetime so I don't know why it's inconsistent in its return type, but with this simple approach you can neutralize that inconsistency).