Contributing

Contributions are welcome, and they are greatly appreciated! Every little bit helps, and credit will always be given.

You can contribute in many ways:

Types of Contributions

Report Bugs

Report bugs at https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/issues.

If you are reporting a bug, please include:

  • Your operating system name and version.
  • Any details about your local setup that might be helpful in troubleshooting.
  • Detailed steps to reproduce the bug.

Fix Bugs

Look through the GitHub issues for bugs. Anything tagged with “bug” is open to whoever wants to implement it.

Implement Features

Look through the GitHub issues for features. Anything tagged with “feature” is open to whoever wants to implement it. We encourage you to add new languages to existing stack.

Write Documentation

DateParser could always use more documentation, whether as part of the official DateParser docs, in docstrings, or even on the web in blog posts, articles, and such.

After you make local changes to the documentation, build it with tox:

tox -e docs

Then open .tox/docs/tmp/html/index.html in a web browser to see your local build of the documentation.

Submit Feedback

The best way to send feedback is to file an issue at https://github.com/scrapinghub/dateparser/issues.

If you are proposing a feature:

  • Explain in detail how it would work.
  • Keep the scope as narrow as possible, to make it easier to implement.
  • Remember that contributions are welcome :)

Get Started!

Ready to contribute? Here’s how to set up dateparser for local development.

  1. Fork the dateparser repo on GitHub.

  2. Clone your fork locally:

    $ git clone git@github.com:your_name_here/dateparser.git
    
  3. Install your local copy into a virtualenv. Assuming you have virtualenvwrapper installed, this is how you set up your fork for local development:

    $ mkvirtualenv dateparser
    $ cd dateparser/
    $ python setup.py develop
    
  4. Create a branch for local development:

    $ git checkout -b name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
    

    Now you can make your changes locally.

  5. When you’re done making changes, check that your changes pass flake8 and the tests, including testing other Python versions with tox:

    $ pip install -r tests/requirements.txt # install test dependencies
    $ pip install -r scripts/requirements.txt # install script dependencies
    $ flake8 dateparser tests
    $ nosetests
    $ tox
    

    To get flake8 and tox, just pip install them into your virtualenv. (Note that we use max-line-length = 100 for flake8, this is configured in setup.cfg file.)

  6. Commit your changes and push your branch to GitHub:

    $ git add .
    $ git commit -m "Your detailed description of your changes."
    $ git push origin name-of-your-bugfix-or-feature
    
  7. Submit a pull request through the GitHub website.

Pull Request Guidelines

Before you submit a pull request, check that it meets these guidelines:

  1. The pull request should include tests.
  2. If the pull request adds functionality, the docs should be updated. Put your new functionality into a function with a docstring, and add the feature to the list in README.rst.
  3. Check https://travis-ci.org/scrapinghub/dateparser/pull_requests and make sure that the tests pass for all supported Python versions.
  4. Follow the core developers’ advice which aim to ensure code’s consistency regardless of variety of approaches used by many contributors.
  5. In case you are unable to continue working on a PR, please leave a short comment to notify us. We will be pleased to make any changes required to get it done.

Guidelines for Editing Translation Data

English is the primary language of Dateparser. Dates in all other languages are translated into English equivalents before they are parsed.

The language data that Dateparser uses to parse dates is in dateparser/data/date_translation_data. For each supported language, there is a Python file containing translation data.

Each translation data Python files contains different kinds of translation data for date parsing: month and week names - and their abbreviations, prepositions, conjunctions, frequently used descriptive words and phrases (like “today”), etc.

Translation data Python files are generated from the following sources:

  • Unicode CLDR data in JSON format, located at dateparser_data/cldr_language_data/date_translation_data
  • Additional data from the Dateparser community in YAML format, located at dateparser_data/supplementary_language_data/date_translation_data

If you wish to extend the data of an existing language, or add data for a new language, you must:

  1. Edit or create the corresponding file within dateparser_data/supplementary_language_data/date_translation_data

    See existing files to learn how they are defined, and see Language Data Template for details.

  2. Regenerate the corresponding file within dateparser/data/date_translation_data running the following script:

    scripts/write_complete_data.py
    
  3. Write tests that cover your changes

    You should be able to find tests that cover the affected data, and use copy-and-paste to create the corresponding new test.

    If in doubt, ask Dateparser maintainers for help.