How to specify date format when using pandas.to_csv?

The default output format of to_csv() is:

12/14/2012  12:00:00 AM

I cannot figure out how to output only the date part with specific format:

20121214

or date and time in two separate columns in the csv file:

20121214,  084530

The documentation is too brief to give me any clue as to how to do these. Can anyone help?

Since version v0.13.0 (January 3, 2014) of Pandas you can use the date_format parameter of the to_csv method:

df.to_csv(filename, date_format='%Y%m%d')

You could use strftime to save these as separate columns:

df['date'] = df['datetime'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime('%d%m%Y'))
df['time'] = df['datetime'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime('%H%M%S'))

and then be specific about which columns to export to csv:

df[['date', 'time', ... ]].to_csv('df.csv')