scrapinghub / scrapinghub/dateparser

Parsing ISO 8601 datetimes without hyphens, colons

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#867 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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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

We noticed that ISO 8601 datetimes without hyphens or colons don't seem to be parsable, even though I don't think they're required? Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Times.

E.g.:

>>> import datetime
>>> str(dateparser.parse("2021-01-01T00:00:00Z"))
'2021-01-01 00:00:00+00:00'
>>> str(dateparser.parse("20210101T000000Z"))
'None'

We currently work around such using isodate, with

import dateparser
import isodate

try:
    dt = isodate.parse_datetime(s)
except (isodate.isoerror.ISO8601Error, ValueError):
    dt = dateparser.parse(s)

but weren't sure whether that was intended?

That question aside, many thanks for the wonderfully handy library!

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First steps

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Research direction

No repository files or tests are named. Start by reproducing the two Python dateparser.parse examples from the issue and inspect the parser entry point and its existing ISO 8601 handling; done means the compact form "20210101T000000Z" returns the corresponding timezone-aware datetime rather than None.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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