CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpandas
francmarian
francmarian

Reputation: 61

how to obtain max and min for a datetime in a pandas df?

I am exploring some data using pandas (I imported the dataset from excel using read_excel).

One of my columns is a datetime... How can I select the 'max' and 'min' for this datetime column?

This is the same question as here:

Getting min and max Dates from a pandas dataframe

But, it wasn't answered there... My datetime column is not my index (I just have the default index 0,1,2,3...)

I have tried using max(df['creation_date']) but I dont think its recognizing a date, I get

'31-10-2020 22:33:10'

(In the dataset I have datetime from 2021 too...)

How can I select the max and min date? do I have to make my date to be my index in order to achieve it?

(I come from a sql background... When I do df.info() the Dtype is object for the datetime, can I change the data type of the column of a dataframe to datetime?)

Upvotes: 5

Views: 16786

Answers (1)

Anurag Dabas
Anurag Dabas

Reputation: 24322

just change your 'creation_date' column from object to datetime dtype by:-

df['creation_date']=pd.to_datetime(df['creation_date'])

Now just calculate min and max dates value by:-

df['creation_date'].max()
df['creation_date'].min()

Note:- You can also convert your date like columns in datetime while importing just by passing the list of columns which have Date like Format in parse_date parameter in pd.read_excel() method

Example:-

df=pd.read_excel('your file.xlsx',engine='openpyxl',parse_dates=['creation_date'])

Upvotes: 7

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