Recognize Dates When Importing Data

Pandas can recognize it, but you need to help it a tiny bit: add the argument parse_dates when you’re ading in data from, let’s say, a comma-separated value (CSV) file:

import pandas as pd
pd.read_csv('yourFile', parse_dates=True)

# or this option:
pd.read_csv('yourFile', parse_dates=['columnName'])

There are, however, always weird date-time formats.

No worries! In such cases, you can construct your own parser to deal with this. You could, for example, make a lambda function that takes your DateTime and controls it with a format string.

import pandas as pd
dateparser = lambda x: pd.datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

# Which makes your read command:
pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates=['columnName'], date_parser=dateparse)

# Or combine two columns into a single DateTime column
pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates={'datetime': ['date', 'time']}, date_parser=dateparse)