The first option we\u2019ll show is using the dateutil<\/strong> package. Here\u2019s an example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above, we use a method in dateutil<\/strong> called parse<\/em>. The first parameter to this method is the string of the text we want to use to search for a date. The second parameter, fuzzy_with_tokens<\/em>, is set equal to True \u2013 this causes the method to return where the date is found in the string. In other words, in the string above, the date is found after the substring \u201cToday is \u201c, which is specified in the tuple output. If we want to get just the returned datetime object, we can do this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s see how much we can vary a particular date:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the third line of code above, we don\u2019t specify the year. Here, dateutil<\/strong> assumes by default the year associated with the date is the current one (2018).<\/p>\n\n\n\n If we follow up the last example above of Dec 1<\/strong> with the two-digit abbreviation of a year, dateutil<\/strong> is good enough to figure that out:<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the string below, we leave off the year and month, and just say \u201con the 14th.\u201d In this case, dateutil<\/strong> will assume the month and year are the current month and year, but will parse out the day from the string (in this case, the 14th).<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we want to pass a string that has multiple dates?<\/p>\n\n\n\n By default, the parse<\/strong> method will only return the first date found in the string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could tinker with the method and write some additional code to handle multiple dates in a string, but there is an alternative in the dateparser<\/strong> package.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The dateparser<\/strong> package comes with an option to search for dates in a string, using a method called search_dates<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n search_dates<\/strong> also returns a tuple result, except that the first element of this result is the actual substring identified as a datetime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Next, if we do the example we did above with dateutil<\/strong> we get back two results. This is because dateparser<\/strong> is flagging the word \u201ctoday\u201d as a reference to a date, as well as finding the date \u201c12-01-18.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Likewise, the examples below also identify the word \u201ctoday\u201d as today\u2019s date, while capturing variations of the date \u201cDecember 1, 2018.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n A few more examples like above:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Because search_dates<\/strong> tells us what substring is matched to a datetime, we could exclude results matching to \u201ctoday\u201d like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Here we just use a list comprehension to filter the datetime results to those that don\u2019t match to the word \u201ctoday.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n What if we want to search a longer piece of text? For example, let\u2019s suppose we want to search the Wikipedia page on Python<\/a> for all the appearing datetimes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now results<\/strong> contains a list of the datetimes that appear in the Wikipedia page text. We can get a count of how many datetimes were found using the below code:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Above, we use a list comprehension again. This time, we loop through the datetime results, giving a count of zero if None<\/strong> is returned for a given paragraph (i.e. if no datetime is found in a paragraph); otherwise the number of datetimes gets returned and stored in the list, counts<\/strong>. Summing the counts<\/strong> variable tells us the total number of datetimes found by searching through all the paragraphs on the webpage. In this case, there are 71.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In this post we covered how to extract dates from strings with Python. For more on working with dates, check out this post for standardizing dates with Python<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See my other Python posts by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nfrom dateutil.parser import parse\n \nparse(\"Today is 12-01-18\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateutils-example_1-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nresult = parse(\"Today is 12-01-18\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)\n \n# get just the datetime object\nresult[0]<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nparse(\"Today is December 1, 2018\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)\n \nparse(\"Today is Dec 1 2018\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)\n \nparse(\"Today is Dec 1\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateutils-example_2-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nparse(\"Today is Dec 1 16\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)\n \nparse(\"Today is Dec 1 14\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)\n \nparse(\"Today is Nov 30 12\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateutils-example_3-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\t\nparse(\"on the 14th\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateutils-example_4-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nparse(\"The next one will be on 12-02-18 or 12-03-18\", fuzzy_with_tokens=True)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateparser-example_4-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nOption 2) Extract dates from strings with Python & dateparser<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
from dateparser.search import search_dates\n \nsearch_dates(\"find 12\/15\/18 in this string\")<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateparser-search_dates-example_1-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nsearch_dates(\"Today is 12-01-18\")<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateparser-search_dates-example_2-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nsearch_dates(\"Today is December 1, 2018\")\n \nsearch_dates(\"Today is Dec 1 2018\")\n \nsearch_dates(\"Today is Dec 1\")<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateparser-search_dates-example_3-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nsearch_dates(\"Today is Dec 1 16\") \n \nsearch_dates(\"Today is Dec 1 14\")\n \nsearch_dates(\"Today is Nov 30 12\")<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-dateparser-search_dates-example_4-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nresults = search_dates(\"Today is December 1, 2018\")\n \nneed = [result for result in results if result[0].tolower() != \"today\"]<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n# load additional packages\nfrom bs4 import BeautifulSoup\nimport requests\n \n# get HTML content \/ BeautifulSoup object\nresp = requests.get(\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Python_(programming_language)\")\nsoup = BeautifulSoup(resp.content)\n \n# search for all paragraphs on the webpage \nparagraphs = soup.find_all(\"p\")\n \n# get the text for each paragraph\ntext = [x.text for x in paragraphs]\n \n# scrape any dates from each paragraph\nresults = []\nfor paragraph in text:\n try:\n results.append(search_dates(paragraph))\n except Exception:\n pass<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\ncounts = [0 if result is None else len(result) for result in results]\n \nsum(counts)<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"\/campus\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/07\/python-list-comprehension-if-conditional-datetime-counts-the-automatic-net.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nConclusion<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n