Subtracting Dates to get Days in pandas

Question

I have 2 columns date_1 (dtype('O')) and date_2(dtype(')

date_1            date_2
2018-06-06        2018-04-01

when i do subtraction to get days

df['date_1'] - df['date_2']

i get the error TypeError: incompatible type [object] for a datetime/timedelta operation

Answer 1

Need convert columns to datetimes:

df['date_1'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_1'])
df['date_2'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_2'])

Or:

df = df.apply(pd.to_datetime)

And then:

df['days'] = (df['date_1'] - df['date_2']).dt.days