scrapinghub / scrapinghub/dateparser

[QUESTION] Can search_dates be used to find matches involving two times?

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Type: Enhancement
Dominant language
Python
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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Description

Hello,

First of all, thank you for creating such a nifty general-purpose date/time parser!

I have some texts where the events are defined over two times, e.g. something like

text = "On Monday, December 9 from 10:00 to 15:00 we will deploy FizzBuzzAI to prod"

Currently search_dates is working well at capturing the date, but only returns times for the remainder, i.e.

from dateparser.search import search_dates
search_dates(text)
# output
[('On Monday, December 9', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 0, 0)),
 ('10:00', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 10, 0)),
 ('15:00', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 15, 0))]

What I would like to get as output is two events, one for the start / end of the time period:

event 1: datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 10, 0)
event 2: datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 15, 0)

I can achieve this with some post-processing, but I am curious whether this can be done directly in dateparser?

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start with the dateparser.search.search_dates entry point and reproduce the two-time example from the issue. Determine whether search_dates can represent a start and end time directly; done means documenting the supported behavior or defining the required range-handling change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
backend
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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