Convert Pandas Column to DateTime

Question

I have one field in a pandas DataFrame that was imported as string format. It should be a datetime variable. How do I convert it to a datetime column and then filter based

Answer 1

You can use the DataFrame method .apply() to operate on the values in Mycol:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame(['05SEP2014:00:00:00.000'],columns=['Mycol'])
>>> df
                    Mycol
0  05SEP2014:00:00:00.000
>>> import datetime as dt
>>> df['Mycol'] = df['Mycol'].apply(lambda x: 
                                    dt.datetime.strptime(x,'%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f'))
>>> df
       Mycol
0 2014-09-05