Converting strings to datetime objects in Python has become a common practice for data scientists especially in time series projects. Performing this is often times difficult due to various date formats - different month lengths, timezone variations etc.
To solve this, Python provides a specific data type called “datetime”. But in many datasets, the dates might be represented as strings. This recipe demonstrates how to convert date strings to the datetime format.
datetime.strptime is the primary routine for parsing strings into datetimes. datetime.strptime(date_string, format)
Once you have your value in datetime objects, you can then extract specific components of the date such as the month, day, or year, all of which are available as the object's attributes.
References: https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html#datetime.datetime.strptime http://strftime.org/
## How to convert STRING to DateTime in Python
def Kickstarter_Example_53():
print()
print(format('How to convert STRING to DateTime in Python','*^82'))
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings("ignore")
# Load Libraries
from datetime import datetime
from dateutil.parser import parse
import pandas as pd
# Create a string variable with a datetime
date_start = '2012-03-03'
# Convert the string to datetime format
print()
print(datetime.strptime(date_start, '%Y-%m-%d'))
# Create a list of strings as dates
dates = ['7/2/2017', '8/6/2016', '11/13/2015', '5/26/2014', '5/2/2013']
# Use parse() to attempt to auto-convert common string formats
print()
print(parse(date_start))
print()
print([parse(x) for x in dates])
# Use parse, but designate that the day is first
print()
print(parse(date_start, dayfirst=True))
# Create a dataframe
data = {'date': ['2014-05-01 18:47:05.069722', '2014-05-01 18:47:05.119994',
'2014-05-02 18:47:05.178768', '2014-05-02 18:47:05.230071',
'2014-05-02 18:47:05.230071', '2014-05-02 18:47:05.280592',
'2014-05-03 18:47:05.332662', '2014-05-03 18:47:05.385109',
'2014-05-04 18:47:05.436523', '2014-05-04 18:47:05.486877'],
'value': [1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns = ['date', 'value'])
print(df.dtypes)
# Convert df['date'] from string to datetime
print()
print(pd.to_datetime(df['date']))
print(pd.to_datetime(df['date']).dtypes)
Kickstarter_Example_53()