Human-readable datetime interval to datetime.timedelta in Python?

Question

I find myself needing to specify a timespan in a python configuration file a lot.

Is there a way that I can specify a more human readable timeframe (similar to PostgreSQL's Interval syntax) in a python configuration file with stdlib? Or will this require a 3rd party lib?

Clarification I'm not looking for anything in the ConfigParser.ConfigParser stdlib API specifically. I guess what I really need is a way to go from human readable date/time interval to datetime.timedelta value.

Eun

Answer 1

I don't think there is a standard library module for that. I wrote one that does that. You can install it, or adapt it to your needs.

The module is called pycopia.timespec

It converts strings such as "1day 3min" to seconds, as a float. It's easy to get a datetime.timedelta from that.

Epicycle

Answer 2

I found a good answer to this in an somewhat related question. Turns out the humanfriendly library does that fairly well:

In [1]: import humanfriendly

In [2]: humanfriendly.parse_timespan('1w')
Out[2]: 604800.0

That's in seconds. To get a timedelta object, you can simply load that:

In [3]: from datetime import timedelta

In [4]: timedelta(seconds=humanfriendly.parse_timespan('1w'))
Out[4]: datetime.timedelta(7)

Since humanfriendly also supports converting the other way, you can also do full round trip, which would look like:

In [5]: humanfriendly.format_timespan(timedelta(seconds=humanfriendly.parse_timespan('1w')).total_seconds())
Out[5]: '1 week'

Note how format_timespan does not access timedelta objects, unfortunately: only an integer (seconds).

Freund