datetime to decimal hour and minutes in python3

Question

I have a dataframe with meteorological data every 30 minutes. With my datetime index I need to create a column with timestamps

Answer 1

One way is to extract the hour and convert minutes to hours.

There should be no need to convert to / from strings.

import pandas as pd

idx = pd.DatetimeIndex(['2016-01-01 00:30:00',
                        '2016-01-01 01:00:00',
                        '2016-01-01 01:30:00'],
                       dtype='datetime64[ns]', name='date_time', freq=None)

idx.hour + idx.minute / 60

# Float64Index([0.5, 1.0, 1.5], dtype='float64', name='date_time')