CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpandascsv
Axioms
Axioms

Reputation: 505

Pandas - to_csv() and from_csv()

I've been working to_csv()/read_csv() to read/write a data frame a user works with in an applet, where one of the columns is a datetime.datetime object, and it seems like to_csv automatically converts the datetimes to strings. Is this correct? If so, is there a way to "preserve" the dates as datetime rather than them being converted to strings? I've read through the documentation, and I can't seem to find the answer. Thank you.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 844

Answers (1)

Peter Leimbigler
Peter Leimbigler

Reputation: 11105

To preserve the exact structure of a DataFrame, complete with data types, check out the pickle module, which "serializes" any python object to disk and reloads it back into a python environment.

Use pd.to_pickle instead of pd.to_csv, optionally with a compression argument (see docs):

# Save to pickle
df.to_pickle('pickle-file.pkl')
# Pickle with compression
df.to_pickle('pickle-file.pkl.gz', compression='gzip')

# Load pickle from disk
df = pd.read_pickle('pickle-file.pkl')
# or...
df = pd.read_pickle('pickle-file.pkl.gz', compression='gzip')

Upvotes: 2

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