change multiple columns in pandas dataframe to datetime

Question

I have a dataframe of 13 columns and 55,000 rows I am trying to convert 5 of those rows to datetime, right now they are returning the type \'object\' and I need to transform thi

Answer 1

First you need to extract all the columns your interested in from data then you can use pandas applymap to apply to_datetime to each element in the extracted frame, I assume you know the index of the columns you want to extract, In the code below column names of the third to the sixteenth columns are extracted. you can alternatively define a list and add the names of the columns to it and use that in place, you may also need to pass the date/time format of the the DateTime entries

import pandas as pd

cols_2_extract = data.columns[2:15]

data[cols_2_extract] = data[cols_2_extract].applymap(lambda x : pd.to_datetime(x, format = '%d %M %Y'))