Entries Tagged as 'pyparsing'

Better later than never: the pyparsing-based date parser

As promised in my earlier post I will just release the important part for my date parser using pyparsing. Thanks for Ryan to remind me 😉

Disclaimer: I never really finished (or polished) the code – it is just an excerpt from my actual program that eventually ignored the dates. The grammar probably is faulty, I just publish it as an example how it could be done…

from pyparsing import *
 
# zero-prefixed and non-prefixed numbers from 1 up to 31 (1, 2, ... 01, 02, ...31),
# followed by ordinal (st, nd, rd, ...)
days_zero_prefix = " ".join([("%02d" % x) for x in xrange(1, 10)])
days_no_prefix = " ".join([("%d" % x) for x in xrange(1, 32)])
day_en_short = oneOf("st nd rd th")
day = ( (oneOf(days_zero_prefix) ^ oneOf(days_no_prefix) ).setResultsName("day")
+ Optional(Suppress(day_en_short)) ).setName("day")
 
# months, in numbers or names
months_zero_prefix = oneOf(" ".join([("%02d" % x) for x in xrange(1, 10)]))
months_no_prefix = oneOf(" ".join([("%d" % x) for x in xrange(1, 13)]))
months_en_long = oneOf("January February March April May June July August September October November December")
months_en_short = oneOf("Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec")
months_de_long = oneOf("Januar Februar M\cx3rz April Mai Juni Juli August September Oktober November Dezember")
months_de_short = oneOf("Jan Feb M\xc3r Apr Mai Jun Jul Aug Sep Okt Nov Dez")
month = (months_zero_prefix.setName("month_zp").setResultsName("month") |
months_no_prefix.setName("month_np").setResultsName("month") |
months_en_long.setName("month_enl").setResultsName("month") |
months_en_short.setName("month_ens").setResultsName("month") |
months_de_long.setResultsName("month") |
months_de_long.setResultsName("month"))
 
# years, between 1995 and 2009, two- or four-digit format
lowest_year, highest_year = 1995, 2010
years = " ".join([("%d" % x) for x in xrange(lowest_year, highest_year)])
years_short = " ".join([("%02d" % (x % 100)) for x in xrange(lowest_year, highest_year)])
year_long = oneOf(years)
year = (year_long ^ oneOf(years_short)).setResultsName("year")
 
# choice of separators between date items; if two occur, they should match
sep_literals = oneOf(". - /") ^ White() # ".-/ "
sec_lit = matchPreviousLiteral(sep_literals)
 
# optional comma
comma = Literal(",") | White()
# punctuation
punctuation = oneOf([x for x in string.punctuation])
 
# EBNF resulting
date_normal = day + Suppress(sep_literals) + month + Suppress(sec_lit) + year
date_rev = year + Suppress(sep_literals) + month + Suppress(sec_lit) + day
date_usa = month + Suppress(sep_literals) + day + Suppress(sec_lit) + year
date_written = (months_en_long.setResultsName("month") | months_en_short.setResultsName("month")) + day + Suppress(comma) + year
 
# HTML tag Bounds
anyTag = anyOpenTag | anyCloseTag
date_start = Suppress(WordStart() ^ anyTag ^ punctuation)
# FIXME: there is a problem here
date_end = Suppress(WordEnd() ^ anyTag ^ punctuation)
 
# final BNF
parser = date_start + (date_normal ^ date_usa ^ date_written ^ date_rev) + date_end
 
# now do some parsing
for result, a, b in parser.scanString("13.01.2000"):
print result["day"], result["month"], result["year"] == year

Note that the month names are given in English and German (as is the date format); Further, I’m pretty sure it is very inefficient doing the date string parsing like that.

If you find any errors in this code or have questions, feel free to leave a comment 😉

Tags: programming, python by Phil
5 Comments »

Parsing Date Strings with pyparsing

Now that the Genre Detection stuff (a lot has happened in the last months… was too busy to write more about it here…) works pretty well, it is time to fine-tune the approach and enhance the results. And one feature I deliberately left out in the beginning (as, then, I didn’t see how to achieve this in a short time) is the occurrence of date strings like “May 25th, 2008” or “21.12.2007” in the text of a web page – which is obviously a good feature for some web genres. There are a lot regular expressions floating around that do exactly that more or less elegantly to a certain extent, but they are a) rarely understandable, b) therefore not easy to alter, c) often lack the different formats of human-readable dates and d) it is so much more fun to do it yourself 🙂 .

As I am fiddling around with Python anyway, I thought to give pyparsing a try. And – after having found a few how-tos and articles (e.g. these slides) – I got started rather easily and I am pretty much impressed of how quickly one can write a decent (in this case not descent 🙂 ) parser that Does What I Want. I am not yet finished, but the most basic use cases work. I still have to put together unit tests and polish the script. The one thing that could still be better is performance (heck, it is s-l-o-w scanning a reasonable big HTML page for occurrences of date strings), but I think the responsibility is mostly on my part, as my code follows a brute force approach and I’m sure there are lots of possibilities to enhance it.

Well, we’ll see… I think as soon as the code looks a bit better I’ll release it here for anyone interested.

Tags: programming, python, Uncategorized by Phil
4 Comments »