Introduction and Examples
-------------------------

The fuzzyparsers library provides a small collection of functions to sanitize
free form user input.  For the moment its chief value is the flexible date
parser.  The library strives to be locale smart in parsing dates.

The library has two main parsers.  The first is a prefix parser which compares
a string to a list of strings and returns the unique element of the list which
matches the prefix.  An exception is thrown if the match is not unique.

    >>> from fuzzyparsers import fuzzy_match
    >>> fuzzy_match(['aab','bba','abc'],'aa')
    'aab'
    >>> fuzzy_match(['aab','bba','abc'],'a')  # two strings starting with 'a'.
    Traceback (most recent call last):
    ... 
    ValueError: ambiguous match for 'a'

The second parser parses dates in various formats and returns a datetime.date
object.  Accepted formats include::

    jan 12, 2003
    jan 5
    2004-3-5
    +34 -- 34 days in the future (relative to todays date)
    -4 -- 4 days in the past (relative to todays date)

For instance:

    >>> from fuzzyparsers import parse_date
    >>> parse_date('jun 17 2010') # my youngest son's birthday
    datetime.date(2010, 6, 17)

The library allows setting a default date to fill in specified components of a
date (e.g. the year).  By default, a date with-out a year to will give the
current year.

    >>> from fuzzyparsers import DateParser
    >>> import datetime
    >>> DateParser(today=datetime.date(2013, 3, 1)).parse_date('feb 3')
    datetime.date(2013, 2, 3)

TODO
----

We'd like to support the following features:

* Parsing time strings like "10 am" and "2 3 pm"
* A "[0-9]*.[0-9]*" with the first hunk a month and the second hunk a day
  should return the month/day combination which is nearest.  For example,
  "12-3" would return december 3 of this year or last year.

Changelog
---------
* 0.8.0 - switch to MIT license because I couldn't figure out why I cared about
  GPL for this package.
* 0.7.3 - locale month-day order issues fixed (thanks to Treeve for getting
  this started.
* 0.7.2 - added doc-tests and "march 2012" date format; doc-test scripts
* 0.7.1 - install fixes
* 0.7 - overhaul of date parsing api to support relative dates (not necessarily
  relative to the current date)
* 0.6.x - initial public release and series of doc/install corrections

Installation
------------

Fuzzyparsers is written by Joel B. Mohler and distributed under the terms of
the MIT license.

Use the following commands to run the extensive doc-tests::

    python -m doctest fuzzyparsers/*.py
    python -m doctest README.txt

To install fuzzyparsers, do the normal python thing (probably as root)::

    python setup.py install

or::

    eazy_install fuzzyparsers
