How to change the datetime format in pandas

Question

My dataframe has a DOB column (example format 1/1/2016) which by default gets converted to pandas dtype \'object\': DOB object

Answer 1

Compared to the first answer, I will recommend to use dt.strftime() first, then pd.to_datetime(). In this way, it will still result in the datetime data type.

For example,

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'DOB': {0: '26/1/2016 ', 1: '26/1/2016 '})
print(df.dtypes)

df['DOB1'] = df['DOB'].dt.strftime('%m/%d/%Y')
print(df.dtypes)

df['DOB1'] = pd.to_datetime(df['DOB1'])
print(df.dtypes)

Answer 2

You can try this it'll convert the date format to DD-MM-YYYY:

df['DOB'] = pd.to_datetime(df['DOB'], dayfirst = True)