dateinfer
Python library to infer date format from examples
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Table of Contents
Problem Statement
Imagine that you are given a large collection of documents and, as part of the extraction process, extract date
information and store it in a normalized format. If the documents follow a single schema, the ideal approach
is to craft a date parsing string for the schema. However, if the documents follow different schemas or if the
contents are noisy (e.g. date fields were hand-populated), the development can become onerous.
This library makes a “best guess” on the proper date parsing string (datetime.strptime) based on examples in
the file.
Installation
The simplest way to install the library is:
$ pip install dateinfer
Usage
Give dateinfer.infer a list of example date strings. infer returns a datetime.strftime/strptime-compliant
date format string for its “best guess” of a format string that will correctly parse the majority of the examples.