GSoC 2017 @ dateparser

So finally Google Summer of Code 2017 is coming to an end. It was an amazing experience to be a part of this prestigious program and I learned a lot in these three months about open source development. Work Summary I worked on dateparser , a project under sub-org Scrapinghub of Python Software Foundation (PSF) , that deals with parsing dates in various languages and formats. The objective of the project was to integrate translation data of all locales in Unicode Common Locale Data Repository(CLDR) which is a standard repository of locale specific data with the existing translation data in dateparser. Here is a brief outline of the work done on my project on dateparser during GSoC 2017: Work Completed 1.   Retrieved Translation data from Unicode CLDR Scripts were written to retrieve translation data from unicode CLDR  github repository. The translation data for dates and numerals were separately stored. 2. Ordered languages by population The languages were...

Finally I have successfully implemented translation of date strings with new integrated data. I have been working on it for a long while now, much more than I expected. I expected to be completely finished with translation of date strings without numeral words much earlier and I was planning to get started with numeral parser as early as possible. But it took me a while longer as I did not think clearly and therefore started on with a complicated solution and then moved on to simpler solutions. As I mentioned in my last blog post, the problem was to translate relative date strings, which are of two types, one that have no digits like 'yesterday' and the other that have digits and are stored as regex patterns like '(\\d+) day ago'. Currently dateparser uses translations for 'ago' and 'in' along with other words and relative dates are translated in a similar way as other date strings. First dates are splitted by numbers within dates and then by known wo...

As I mentioned in the last blog post, I have been working to modify the codebase so that dateparser could use new data to parse date strings. Most of the new data for date translation is similar to previous data used for translation, the only major difference is in dealing with relative type date strings. The previous data used translations for ago and in to translate relative type date strings like "10 years ago",  "15 hours 10 minutes ago", "in 10 minutes and 8 seconds". But the data retrieved from unicode CLDR contains translation for complete date strings so that they translate directly to formats like "** year ago" or "in ** month" which can be used further for parsing. Initially I thought direct translations like these would work but then I realised that many relative dates are not covered in these translations. These include dates that contains more than one date fields, like "1 year 3 months ago" and dates that includ...