Pandas - “time data does not match format ” error when the string does match the format?

Question

I\'m getting a value error saying my data does not match the format when it does. Not sure if this is a bug or I\'m missing something here. I\'m referring to this documentat

Answer 1

There seems to be an issue with your date strings. I replicated your issue with your sample data and if I remove the hyphens and replace them manually (for the first three dates) then the code works

pd.to_datetime(df1['Date'] ,errors ='coerce')

output:

0    2018-07-02
1    2018-08-27
2    2018-05-28
3           NaT
4           NaT
5           NaT
6           NaT
7           NaT
8           NaT
9           NaT
10          NaT
11          NaT
12          NaT
13          NaT
14          NaT
15          NaT

Bottom line: your hyphens look like regular ones but are actually something else, just clean your source data and you're good to go

Answer 2

You got a special mark here it is not -

df.iloc[0,0][2]
Out[287]: '‑'

Replace it with '-'

pd.to_datetime(df.iloc[:,0].str.replace('‑','-'),format='%d-%b-%Y')
Out[288]: 
0    2018-08-27
1    2018-05-28
2    2017-06-19
3    2018-03-05
4    2018-01-15
5    2013-11-11
6    2015-11-23
7    2014-06-23
8    2018-06-18
9    2018-04-30
10   2018-05-14
11   2018-04-16
12   2018-02-26
13   2018-03-19
14   2015-06-29
Name: 2‑Jul‑2018, dtype: datetime64[ns]