Date Time Expression

dte is a WIP date-time processing language with focus on broad interpretation.

If you don’t think it’s intuitive, it’s most likely unfinished.

It is strongly inspired by pdd.

How to use & What to know

pip install dte

Conventions

• When there is margin for ambiguity, expressions are always interpreted with highest units appearing before, complying with ISO-8601, e.g.: 2021-06-13, 2023 August 27 or 2019 Jul 20
• Unix timestamps are both interpreted and output in seconds by default, but this is configurable
• When specifying time, just remember that M is for month and m is for minute

Configuration File

dte tries to read a config.json file under config directory (~/.config/dte/ on Linux). In it you can set the following options:

{
  "timestamp_unit": "<seconds|milliseconds>"
  "clock": "<24|12>",
  "datetime_output_format": "<ISO8601|<format>>",
  "comparison_tolerance_seconds": <float>,
  "basedate_output_format": "%Y-%b",
  "decimal_places": <integer>
}

Dependencies

• dateutil handles month and year’s complex operations
• ply is a pure-Python implementation of the popular compiler construction tools lex and yacc
• appdirs for reading config file in a cross-platform manner

To do

• [ ] format(timepoint, fmt) (in keyword) units given current time field
• [ ] add custom/OS locale support (?)
• [ ] add tab-completion for:
  • [ ] months
  • [ ] units given current datetime field or RHS of in keyword
• [ ] “days until winter”
• [ ] run tests across a variety of locales
• [ ] add show function
  • [ ] show clock for time
  • [ ] show cal for date and basedate

Examples

The following examples are generated based on tests run, so many results will be relative to the day it was tested. Every expression on the left side is valid syntax.