Sensible date parsing in Python courtesy of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1810432/handling-the-different-results-from-parsedatetime/5903760#5903760

datetimeFromString.py

import parsedatetime.parsedatetime as pdt

def datetimeFromString( s ):

    c = pdt.Calendar()
    result, what = c.parse( s )

    dt = None

    # what was returned (see http://code-bear.com/code/parsedatetime/docs/)
    # 0 = failed to parse
    # 1 = date (with current time, as a struct_time)
    # 2 = time (with current date, as a struct_time)
    # 3 = datetime
    if what in (1,2):
        # result is struct_time
        dt = datetime.datetime( *result[:6] )
    elif what == 3:
        # result is a datetime
        dt = result

    if dt is None:
        # Failed to parse
        raise ValueError, ("Don't understand date '"+s+"'")

    return dt