scrapinghub / scrapinghub/dateparser

search_dates: problem with numeric incomplete dates

Open
#890 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

search_dates
Dominant language
Python
Stars
2.9k
Forks
520
Avg merge
22h 56m
Merged PRs (30d)
6

Description

Issue may be in part related to #846

I have trouble to make search_dates recognise numeric incomplete dates correctly, such as 05/2020 or 2020.

  1. In the first case, the 05 is recognised as day (and not as month, even though DATE_ORDER is DMY). Even more interesting is that the "month" in the datetime object depends on previously detected months.
    --> incomplete data matching should recognises the DATE_ORDER argument (thus recognising this as month) or date_formats could be supplied to search_dates, so that %m/%Y can be defined as date format.

  2. the year is recognised, the day is set according to PREFERED_DAY_OF_MONTH, but the month is set the months recognised earlier in the text.
    --> would it be possible to have a PREFERED_MONTH_OF_YEAR option?

Text1: "test 01.05.2020 test. test 06/07/2020. test 05/2020. test 2020"
Result1: [('01.05.2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 1, 0, 0)), ('06/07/2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 6, 0, 0)), ('05/2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 5, 0, 0)), ('2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 7, 1, 0, 0))]

Text2: "test 01.05.2020 test. test 06/10/2020. test 05/2020. test 2020"
Result2: [('01.05.2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 5, 1, 0, 0)), ('06/10/2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 10, 6, 0, 0)), ('05/2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 10, 5, 0, 0)), ('2020', datetime.datetime(2020, 10, 1, 0, 0))]

The first two dates are correct, the the third and fourth are not.

Thanks a lot :)

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 at the search_dates entry point and reproduce the Text1 and Text2 examples from the issue. Trace how incomplete numeric dates use DATE_ORDER, PREFERED_DAY_OF_MONTH, and previously detected months, then define behavior for 05/2020 and 2020 and verify that the reported results no longer depend on earlier dates.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
python
Domain
backend
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
35/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.