[QUESTION] Can search_dates be used to find matches involving two times?

[lewtun]

Hello,

First of all, thank you for creating such a nifty general-purpose date/time parser!

I have some texts where the events are defined over two times, e.g. something like

text = "On Monday, December 9 from 10:00 to 15:00 we will deploy FizzBuzzAI to prod"

Currently search_dates is working well at capturing the date, but only returns times for the remainder, i.e.

from dateparser.search import search_dates
search_dates(text)
# output
[('On Monday, December 9', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 0, 0)),
 ('10:00', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 10, 0)),
 ('15:00', datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 15, 0))]

What I would like to get as output is two events, one for the start / end of the time period:

event 1: datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 10, 0)
event 2: datetime.datetime(2020, 12, 9, 15, 0)

I can achieve this with some post-processing, but I am curious whether this can be done directly in dateparser?

[noviluni]

Hi @lewtun, thanks for opening the issue!

This feature is not implemented. As stated in the documentation (https://dateparser.readthedocs.io/en/latest/introduction.html#search-for-dates-in-longer-chunks-of-text), the search_dates support is limited, but we encourage people to contribute to improve it.

I will keep the issue open as a feature request :)