How do I convert dates in a Pandas data frame to a 'date' data type?

Question

I have a Pandas data frame, one of the columns of which contains date strings in the format 'YYYY-MM-DD' e.g. '2013-10-28'.

At the moment the dtype of the column is 'object'.

How do I convert the column values to Pandas date format?

Answer 1

Use astype:

In [31]: df

Out[31]: 

   a        time

0  1  2013-01-01

1  2  2013-01-02

2  3  2013-01-03

In [32]: df['time'] = df['time'].astype('datetime64[ns]')

In [33]: df

Out[33]: 

   a                time

0  1 2013-01-01 00:00:00

1  2 2013-01-02 00:00:00

2  3 2013-01-03 00:00:00

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