Create time parsing utility function

[gunthercox]

It would be useful to have access to a utility function that could parse date time objects out of sentences. Use cases include scheduling reminders and looking up historical information.

Example input:

• "Let's meet next tuesday."
• "Do you want to meet on Tuesday or Thursday?"
• "We will deploy our new app in the first quarter of 2016."
• (Standard datetime formats)
• "My birthday is on January 1st."

[rmdort]

I have been using NLTK timex parser to parse date and time just like https://duckling.wit.ai/ . We also parse email, url, phone numbers.

NLTK parser: https://github.com/nltk/nltk_contrib/blob/master/nltk_contrib/timex.py

Do you have an API skeleton in mind, if so i can help with this

[gunthercox]

For the API I was thinking of just a simple function that takes a string as input and returns a list of Python datetime objects in the order that they were found in the string. So something like:

from chatterbot.utils.parsing import datetime_parsing

dates = datetime_parsing('I have meetings on November 2nd and 3rd.')
print(dates)

>>> [datetime(xxx), datetime(yyy)]

[rmdort]

Noted.

Hi @gunthercox , I have a question regarding the license of this app.

1. Can chatterbot be used for commercial purposes?
2. What kind of License is it released under? MIT?

[rmdort]

This is where I am right now.

>>> from chatterbot.utils.parsing import datetime_parsing
>>> dates = datetime_parsing('I have meetings on November 2nd and 3rd. My next holiday is whole of next week. I am free this friday and I am going on leave the day after tomorrow')
>>> print (dates)
[([datetime.datetime(2016, 11, 2, 0, 0), datetime.datetime(2016, 11, 3, 0, 0)], (19, 54)), (datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 10, 16, 31, 8, 449717), (84, 108)), (datetime.date(2016, 10, 7), (120, 146)), (datetime.datetime(2016, 10, 5, 16, 31, 8, 449717), (175, 208))]

If you notice the first date object is an array of dates (since the user is referring to multiple dates), while others are not. The second object is the start and end position in the text

Yet to add tests. How do i run tests? Sorry I am coming from Javascript :)

[gunthercox]

ChatterBot is distributed under the BSD 3-clause licence (similar to many other Python projects such as Django). This license does allow for commercial use.

For running tests, this project uses nose. Nose can be installed with pip by running pip install nose. Tests can be run using the command nosetests and individual test files can be specified by running nosetests path/to/test/file.py

[rmdort]

Awesome thanks. I didnt see the license information in license.md file, thats the reason i asked.

[gunthercox]

Closed by https://github.com/gunthercox/ChatterBot/pull/321