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The format of dates I am looking to capture fall into permutations of the pattern "word/DD/YYYY" where word corresponds to months, i.e.

(def months ["january" "January" "february" "February" "march" "March" "April" "april" "may" "May" "june" "June" "july" "July" "august" "August" "september" "September" "october" "October" "november" "November" "december" "December"])

So, possible permutations of the above pattern would be "DD/word/YYYY" "YYYY/word/DD" and "YYYY/DD/word"

I've tried something along the lines of 

(def months-match (clojure.string/join "|" months))
(def months-str (str "(\\s*(" months-match ")")) 
(def moster (re-pattern  months-str))

(defn foomonths [s]
(map first (re-seq moster s)))

with plans to add the regex for days and years

|[- /.](0[1-9]|[12][0-9]|3[01])[- /.](19|20)\d\d

Permuting the regex has not been an issue. Rather it is the process of formulating months that are words into a regex structure with the days and years in digits.

sunspots
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1 Answers1

7

I see that your questions is about regexes, so my apologies if this answer is off topic, though if I may suggest a slightly different approach, clj-time includes a time formatter that can handle most of these cases out of the box:

project.clj:

 (defproject hello "0.1.0-SNAPSHOT"
  :description "FIXME: write description"
  :url "http://example.com/FIXME"
  :license {:name "Eclipse Public License"
            :url "http://www.eclipse.org/legal/epl-v10.html"}
  :dependencies [[org.clojure/clojure "1.5.1"]
              [clj-time "0.6.0"]]
  :source-paths ["dev"]) 

user> (def custom-formatter (formatter "dd/MMMMMMMMM/YYYY"))
#'user/custom-formatter

user> (parse custom-formatter "14/June/2014")
#<DateTime 2014-06-14T00:00:00.000Z>

user> (parse custom-formatter "14/september/2014")
#<DateTime 2014-09-14T00:00:00.000Z>

So you could write one time format string for each permutation and then just try each until you get a match

Arthur Ulfeldt
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  • Is it possible to convert the outputs into vectors? I tried using the 'into' function, but it was to no avail. – sunspots Jan 31 '14 at 20:20
  • Also, how would one extract the date as is? Not in the DateTime format, rather 14/June/2014 as in your example? – sunspots Jan 31 '14 at 21:05
  • 1) if you pass the result of the call to parse to the bean function you get it as a map, then you can (if you want) convert that to a vector by calling vals and then vec. (if you want all the information) – Arthur Ulfeldt Jan 31 '14 at 23:16
  • 2) one option is to parse it into a data object, then call `unparse` on it in a the desired output format. Otherwise it's a very different answer. (more like your original question) – Arthur Ulfeldt Jan 31 '14 at 23:17