<p>I'm looking for a Python module that would take an arbitrary block of text, search it for something that looks like a date string, and build a DateTime object out of it.  Something like <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~sartak/Date-Extract-0.03/lib/Date/Extract.pm" rel="noreferrer">Date::Extract</a> in Perl</p>

<p>Thank you in advance.</p>

The nearest equivalent is probably the
dateutil
module.  Usage is:
```
```
>>> from dateutil.parser import parse
>>> parse("Wed, Nov 12")
datetime.datetime(2008, 11, 12, 0, 0)
```
```
Using the fuzzy parameter should ignore extraneous text.  ie
```
```
>>> parse("the date was the 1st of December 2006 2:30pm", fuzzy=True)
datetime.datetime(2006, 12, 1, 14, 30)
```
```