Recently needed the ability to parse durations from human readable strings that were also context aware. The context being the date to start your duration calculation from so that if you started on January 1st 2017 and wanted 2 months you’d get exactly 31 (number of days in January 2017) + 28 (number of days in February). Then if I gave it the context of April 1st I’d get 61 days since there were two months with 31 days each.
I tried to find an existing library with no luck so I wrote delta to take care
of the job and hopefully someone else would find it of use. You can get your
hands on delta easily through pypi like so:
pip install delta
Once installed you can use it like so:
import delta
from datetime import datetime
print(delta.parse('1 year 2 months and 3 days'))
print(delta.parse('2 months and 3.5 weeks', datetime(2017, 3, 4)))
You can see that delta allows you to easily include a context or not and when
you don’t supply the context it will assume the current date. Another thing you
may have noticed is you can get quite expressive with the duration expressions
being able to do all of the following:
1 year 2 months and 3 weeks
2 months, 3 weeks and 12 days
1y 2m 3w 4d
3.5 years and 2.7 days
delta will handle all of those without any issues.
If you find delta useful then head over to the github
project and open any issues or contribute a PR for any additional features you’d
like.