1.4.2

New features

• Add an IGNORE_SURROUNDING_TEXT setting that, when enabled, retries parsing after ignoring leading and trailing words the language does not recognize, so a date wrapped in extra text such as "Published on
  16/04/2019" is parsed (#1356)
• Add a strategy argument to search_dates() to choose the search strategy: the default "split" keeps the current behavior, while the new "ngram" strategy parses the longest sequences of tokens as
  dates for more predictable results on noisy text (#1351)

Fixes

• Do not read a two-digit number as a year once a later component has been found in year-first date orders, so the day in Japanese dates such as "4月20日" is no longer consumed as the year (#1358)
• Parse ISO 8601 dates (those starting with a four-digit year) in month-day order even when an explicit day-first language such as it or fr is given, without needing to set PREFER_LOCALE_DATE_ORDER to
  False (#1352)
• Honor PREFER_DATES_FROM and RELATIVE_BASE when parsing with custom date_formats that use a two-digit year (%y) (#1342)
• Honor the %j (day of year) directive in date_formats instead of overwriting the parsed month and day with the current date (#1345)

Improvements

• Update the bundled CLDR locale data to 44.1.0, adding many newly recognized date forms across locales and a standalone hour/duration unit (e.g. Catalan "2 hores"), while keeping previously supported forms
  parseable (#1343)
• Add the Italian expressions "un ora fa" and "un'ora fa", and skip "alle" so phrases like "oggi alle 11:00" parse (#1049)
• Expand Czech date translations with month locative/dative forms (e.g. "v lednu 2023"), the July abbreviation "črv", and relative expressions such as "za týden", "za měsíc" and "za rok" (#1172)
• Specify the README header content as RST rather than raw HTML (#1360)