Pandas - automatically detect date columns **at run time**

Question

I was wondering if pandas is capable of automatically detecting which columns are datetime objects and read those columns in as dates instead of strings?

I am looki

Answer 1

I would use pd.to_datetime, and catch exceptions on columns that don't work. For example:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv('test.csv')

for col in df.columns:
    if df[col].dtype == 'object':
        try:
            df[col] = pd.to_datetime(df[col])
        except ValueError:
            pass

df.dtypes
# (object, datetime64[ns], int64)

I believe this is as close to "automatic" as you can get for this application.