Recipe Objective

Have you ever tried to work on datetime features in a dataset? It may look quite complicated to write datetime in its format, we can write date and time in form of strings but how to convert it in DateTime Stamp.

So this is the recipe on how we can convert string variables into DateTime variables in Python.

Step 1 - Import the library

We have imported pandas which will be required.

Step 2 - Creating DataFrame

We have created a datetime dataframe by passing a dictionary with data time written as strings in pd.DataFrame. draw_data = {"date": ["2017-09-01T01:23:41.004053", "2017-10-15T01:21:38.004053", "2017-12-17T01:17:38.004053"], "score": [25, 94, 57]} df = pd.DataFrame(raw_data, columns = ["date", "score"]) print(df); print(df.dtypes)

Step 3 - Converting Strings to DateTime

We have used the function pd.to_datetime to change the feature with dates in it to datatime stamp. df["date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["date"]) print(df); print(df.dtypes)

                         date  score
0  2017-09-01T01:23:41.004053     25
1  2017-10-15T01:21:38.004053     94
2  2017-12-17T01:17:38.004053     57
date     object
score     int64
dtype: object

                        date  score
0 2017-09-01 01:23:41.004053     25
1 2017-10-15 01:21:38.004053     94
2 2017-12-17 01:17:38.004053     57
date     datetime64[ns]
score             int64
dtype: object