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I have one field in a pandas DataFrame that was imported as string format.
It should be a datetime variable.
How do I convert it to a datetime column and then filter based on date.
Example:
- DataFrame Name: raw_data
- Column Name: Mycol
- Value
Format in Column: ’05SEP2014:00:00:00.000′
Answer #1:
Use the to_datetime function, specifying a format to match your data.
raw_data['Mycol'] = pd.to_datetime(raw_data['Mycol'], format='%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f')
Answer #2:
You can use the DataFrame method .apply() to operate on the values in Mycol:
>>> df = pd.DataFrame(['05SEP2014:00:00:00.000'],columns=['Mycol'])
>>> df
Mycol
0 05SEP2014:00:00:00.000
>>> import datetime as dt
>>> df['Mycol'] = df['Mycol'].apply(lambda x:
dt.datetime.strptime(x,'%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f'))
>>> df
Mycol
0 2014-09-05
Answer #3:
If you have more than one column to be converted you can do the following:
df[["col1", "col2", "col3"]] = df[["col1", "col2", "col3"]].apply(pd.to_datetime)
Answer #4:
Use the pandas to_datetime function to parse the column as DateTime. Also, by using infer_datetime_format=True, it will automatically detect the format and convert the mentioned column to DateTime.
import pandas as pd
raw_data['Mycol'] = pd.to_datetime(raw_data['Mycol'], infer_datetime_format=True)
Answer #5:
raw_data['Mycol'] = pd.to_datetime(raw_data['Mycol'], format='%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f')
works, however it results in a Python warning of
A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame.
Try using .loc[row_indexer,col_indexer] = value instead
I would guess this is due to some chaining indexing.
