calculate datetime-difference in years, months, etc. in a new pandas dataframe column

Question

I have a pandas dataframe looking like this:

Name    start        end
A       2000-01-10   1970-04-29

I want to add a new column providing the

Answer 1

You can try the following function to calculate the difference -

def yearmonthdiff(row):
    s = row['start']
    e = row['end']
    y = s.year - e.year
    m = s.month - e.month
    d = s.day - e.day
    if m < 0:
        y = y - 1
        m = m + 12
    if m == 0:
        if d < 0:
            m = m -1
        elif d == 0:
            s1 = s.hour*3600 + s.minute*60 + s.second
            s2 = e.hour*3600 + e.minut*60 + e.second
            if s1 < s2:
                m = m - 1
    return '{}y{}m'.format(y,m)

Where row is the dataframe row . I am assuming your start and end columns are datetime objects. Then you can use DataFrame.apply() function to apply it to each row.

df

Out[92]:
                       start                        end
0 2000-01-10 00:00:00.000000 1970-04-29 00:00:00.000000
1 2015-07-18 17:54:59.070381 2014-01-11 17:55:10.053381

df['diff'] = df.apply(yearmonthdiff, axis=1)

In [97]: df
Out[97]:
                       start                        end   diff
0 2000-01-10 00:00:00.000000 1970-04-29 00:00:00.000000  29y9m
1 2015-07-18 17:54:59.070381 2014-01-11 17:55:10.053381   1y6m