CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpandas
Richard
Richard

Reputation: 65600

read_csv with parse_date not recognising dates?

I have a CSV file that looks like this:

date,important
July 2015,True
August 2015,False

But when I try to read it into pandas using read_csv with the parse_dates flag, it isn't parsing the date column as dates:

df = pd.read_csv('test.csv', parse_dates=True)
df
          date important
0    July 2015      True
1  August 2015     False

I guess this is because they aren't date objects in a recognised format, but is there any way around this?

I can use df.date = pd.to_datetime(df.date) just fine, so I find it odd that I can't do that on import.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 740

Answers (1)

user2285236
user2285236

Reputation:

By default, it parses the index as date and there is no index specified here. Either pass index_col=0 or specify the name of the column:

df = pd.read_csv('test.csv', parse_dates=['date'])

df
Out[30]: 
        date important
0 2015-07-01      True
1 2015-08-01     False

Or

df = pd.read_csv('test.txt', parse_dates=True, index_col=0)

df
Out[33]: 
           important
date                
2015-07-01      True
2015-08-01     False

Upvotes: 1

Related Questions