[patch] newforms support for parsedatetime with DateField

[Brantley <deadwisdom@…>]

What about these for "cleaning" Date-based fields? Or maybe for a "HumanDateTimeField()"? They would allow people to enter in hazy, non specific dates and times, like "tomorrow", "next tuesday", or "10/24/2006".

​http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/ParseTime/1.0
​http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/parsedatetime/0.8.0

The second seems more robust, but the first seems more lightweight.

[James Bennett]

AFAIK this is possible right now because we bundle Simon's magic date-parsing JavaScript. Is that not working for you?

[Brantley]

Oh, I hadn't realized. Of course that would be good. I'm not sure that it should be done at the Javascript level, though.

[Adrian Holovaty]

As those two date-parsing libraries are third-party modules (and released under different licenses than ours), I don't think we should use them by the default DateField. If you reopen this with a full patch, we could add it to django.newforms.extras as an optional add-on for folks who have it installed. (If you decide to do that, I'd encourage you to use parsedatetime rather than ParseTime, because the former appears to be more portable across different OSes.)

[Brantley <deadwisdom@…>]

Will do.

[Brantley <deadwisdom@…>]

Well, since this is no django.newforms.extras yet, there is no diff available. So I attached extras.py.

[Brantley <deadwisdom@…>]

HumanDateTimeField

[Adrian Holovaty]

#8 is similar. We can close that ticket once we've integrated newforms into the Django admin site and with Django models.

[Gary Wilson <gary.wilson@…>]

From this comment in #8:

What about using dateutil's parse method? Seems to work really well:

>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse("Tuesday")
datetime.datetime(2006, 12, 26, 0, 0)

for example...

See: ​http://labix.org/python-dateutil#head-c0e81a473b647dfa787dc11e8c69557ec2c3ecd2

[Gary Wilson <gary.wilson@…>]

Assuming that the 3rd party library will have it's own testing.

[Jacob]

Since it's now pretty easy to write custom fields (​http://www.djangoproject.com/documentation/custom_model_fields/), this is now something anyone can just do in their own apps.