Leave dates as strings using read_excel function from pandas in python

Question

Python 2.7.10
Tried pandas 0.17.1 -- function read_excel
Tried pyexcel 0.1.7 + pyexcel-xlsx 0.0.7 -- function get_records()

Answer 1

I tried saving the file in a CSV UTF-8 format (manually) and used pd.read_csv() and worked fine.

I tried a bunch of things to figure the same thing with read_excel. Did not work anything for me. So, I am guessing read_excel is probably updating your string in a datetime object which you can not control.

Answer 2

• Using converters{'Date': str} option inside the pandas.read_excel which helps. pandas.read_excel(xlsx, sheet, converters={'Date': str})
• you can try convert your timestamp back to the original format
  df['Date'][0].strftime('%Y/%m/%d')

Answer 3

I ran into an identical problem, except pandas was oddly converting only some cells into datetimes. I ended up manually converting each cell into a string like so:

def undate(x):
    if pd.isnull(x):
        return x
    try:
        return x.strftime('%d/%m/%Y')
    except AttributeError:
        return x
    except Exception:
        raise

for i in list_of_possible_date_columns:
    df[i] = df[i].apply(undate)