Can pandas automatically read dates from a CSV file?

Today I was positively surprised by the fact that while reading data from a data file (for example) pandas is able to recognize types of values:

df = pandas.read_csv('test.dat', delimiter=r"\s+", names=['col1','col2','col3'])

For example it can be checked in this way:

for i, r in df.iterrows():
    print type(r['col1']), type(r['col2']), type(r['col3'])

In particular integer, floats and strings were recognized correctly. However, I have a column that has dates in the following format: 2013-6-4. These dates were recognized as strings (not as python date-objects). Is there a way to "learn" pandas to recognized dates?

Solution 1:

You should add parse_dates=True, or parse_dates=['column name'] when reading, thats usually enough to magically parse it. But there are always weird formats which need to be defined manually. In such a case you can also add a date parser function, which is the most flexible way possible.

Suppose you have a column 'datetime' with your string, then:

from datetime import datetime
dateparse = lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

df = pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates=['datetime'], date_parser=dateparse)

This way you can even combine multiple columns into a single datetime column, this merges a 'date' and a 'time' column into a single 'datetime' column:

dateparse = lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

df = pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates={'datetime': ['date', 'time']}, date_parser=dateparse)

You can find directives (i.e. the letters to be used for different formats) for strptime and strftime in this page.

Solution 2:

Perhaps the pandas interface has changed since @Rutger answered, but in the version I'm using (0.15.2), the date_parser function receives a list of dates instead of a single value. In this case, his code should be updated like so:

from datetime import datetime
import pandas as pd

dateparse = lambda dates: [datetime.strptime(d, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S') for d in dates]
    
df = pd.read_csv('test.dat', parse_dates=['datetime'], date_parser=dateparse)

Since the original question asker said he wants dates and the dates are in 2013-6-4 format, the dateparse function should really be:

dateparse = lambda dates: [datetime.strptime(d, '%Y-%m-%d').date() for d in dates]