Brtdku

I was just wondering if anyone has a bit of code I could recycle please.

I want to convert an alexa slot type of duration passed into my python code as a string into a number of minutes....

I think I could do it, but it would take a while as my string handling is not great and I think I'd end up writing about 30 lines of code :)

So convert something like PD2T5H25M to :

2*24*60  +  5* 60  + 25 = answer.

(i don't need to handle years)

I'd be very grateful if anyone has this already done?

cheers

You can use regex, here a simple example working on that particular case:

import re



txt='PD2T5H25M'



re1='.*?'       # Non-greedy match on filler

re2='(D)'       # Single Character D

re3='(\d+)'    # Integer Number 1

re4='.*?'       # Non-greedy match on filler

re5='(\d+)'    # Integer Number 2

re6='(H)'       # Single Character H

re7='(\d+)'    # Integer Number 3

re8='(M)'       # Single Character M



rg = re.compile(re1+re2+re3+re4+re5+re6+re7+re8,re.IGNORECASE|re.DOTALL)

m = rg.search(txt)

if m:

    w1   = m.group(1)

    int1 = int(m.group(2))

    int2 = int(m.group(3))

    w2   = m.group(4)

    int3 = int(m.group(5))

    w3   = m.group(6)

    print((int1*24*60) + (int2*60) + int3)

So, after a bit of digging, for future reference for others, here's what happened.

I found that the very clever man that wrote flask-ask has already done all the hard work.

If you pass in a slot type of duration from Alexa, you can use the 'timedelta' option to convert it: like this:

@ask.intent("DurationIntent",convert={'dduration': 'timedelta'})

def duration(dduration):



  print dduration

  try:

    totalmins = dduration.total_seconds()/60

  except:

    print "oh no"

    write_log ('Alexa bad duration', str(dduration))

    return statement('the duration you provided could not be determined please speak more proper - check the log for details')





  print totalmins

  return statement('that is ' + str(int(totalmins)) + 'minutes')

.
.
.
(write_log is my own function so i can track any errors and fine tune the intents and utterances to be more flexible)

"Alexa ask convert - how many minutes is 4 days and 7 hours and 22 minutes"

she replies......

"That is 6202 minutes"

It doesn't seem to work 100% of the time with a combination of years and weeks and hours, but its more than good enough for me to boost some home automation zones....so now i'll replace my slot types of int with "duration" and its all far more flexible...thanks mr flask-ask

cheers