CODEWITHSUNDEEP
python-2.7pandas
shparekh
shparekh

Reputation: 830

How do I format a pandas dataframe string value to date?

I have following string value obtained from a pandas dataframe. 

u'1:19 AM Eastern, Tuesday, May 16, 2017'

How do I convert it to a datetime.datetime(2017,5,16) object?

Thx.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 81

Answers (1)

Mohamed Ali JAMAOUI
Mohamed Ali JAMAOUI

Reputation: 14689

You need to create a custom date parser, to give you some ideas here's a reproducible example: 

import pandas as pd 
import datetime 
from StringIO import StringIO 

st = u'01:19 AM Eastern, Tuesday, May 16, 2017'

def parse_date(date_string):
    date_string = ",".join(date_string.split(',')[-2:]).strip()
    return datetime.datetime.strptime(date_string, '%B %d, %Y')

df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(st), header=None, sep="|", date_parser=parse_date, parse_dates=[0])

If you print the dataFrame content as follows, : 

print("dataframe content")
print(df)

you will get this output: 

 dataframe content
            0
 0 2017-05-16

checking the dtypes confirms that the column is now of type datetime: 

print("dataframe types")
print(df.dtypes)

output:

dataframe types
0    datetime64[ns]
dtype: object

Upvotes: 2

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