Converting object to datetime format in python

Question

Below is the first row of my csv DateTime column:

Mon Nov 02 20:37:10 GMT+00:00 2015

The DateTime column is currently an object and I want to convert it to datetime format so that I can get the date to appear as 2015-11-02 and I will create a separate column for the time.

The code I am using to convert the column to date time format is:

for item, frame in df['DateTime'].iteritems():
     datetime.datetime.strptime(df['DateTime'], "%a-%b-%d-%H-%M-%S-%Z-%Y")

I am getting this error:

> TypeError: must be str, not Series

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Use pd.to_datetime():

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

For example,

pd.to_datetime('Mon Nov 02 20:37:10 GMT+00:00 2015')

produces Timestamp('2015-11-02 20:37:10').

Answer 2

Another solution is to pass errors parameter as per below and its application

df['DateTime'] = pd.to_datetime(df['DateTime'], errors='coerce')

errors{‘ignore’, ‘raise’, ‘coerce’}, default ‘raise’

1. If ‘raise’, then invalid parsing will raise an exception.
2. If ‘coerce’, then invalid parsing will be set as NaN.
3. If ‘ignore’, then invalid parsing will return the input.

Answer 3

I would like to further add to 'Alicia Garcia-Raboso', that after conversion we may need to extract Year, Month . We can do this by df ['DateTime'] = df['DateTime'].dt.year, and so on. This is especially useful when dealing with dataframes.