Convert year string into datetime object

Question

I have a date column in my dataframe that consists of strings like this...'201512' I would like to convert it into a datetime object of just year to do some time series analysis.

I tried...

df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])

and something similar to

datetime.strptime(Date, "%Y")

Is there any reason you can't use the year as a numeric value instead? — Code-Apprentice, May 15 '19 at 21:59
What is `Date`? We can't really do too much to help if we don't even know what you are running calculations with. I would recommend editing your post into a MCVE as described [here](https://stackoverflow.com/help/reprex) — Reedinationer, May 15 '19 at 22:02
This might help [Convert year string into datetime object](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/466345/converting-string-into-datetime) — Vasu Deo.S, May 15 '19 at 22:17

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 15 '19 at 22:10

0

I would look at the module arrow

https://arrow.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

import arrow
date = arrow.now()
#example of text formatting
fdate = date.format('YYYY')

#example of converting text into datetime
date = arrow.get('201905', 'YYYYMM').datetime

answered May 15 '19 at 22:10

eatmeimadanish

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 15 '19 at 22:12

I am not sure how datetime interfaces with pandas dataframes (perhaps somebody will comment if there is special usage), but in general the datetime functions would work like this:

import datetime

date_string = "201512"
date_object = datetime.datetime.strptime(date_string, "%Y%m")
print(date_object)

Getting us:

2015-12-01 00:00:00

Now that the hard part of creating a datetime object is done we simply

print(date_object.year)

Which spits out our desired

2015

More info about the parsing operators (the "%Y%m" bit of my code) is described in the documentation

Convert year string into datetime object

2 Answers2