Convert data type series to datetime

Question

I have a column that is a Series and I want to convert to a datetime format. This particular column of my data frame looks like below:

x
Aug 1, 2019 7:20:04 AM
Aug 1, 2019 7:20:14 AM
Aug 1, 2019 7:20:24 AM
Aug 1, 2019 7:20:34 AM

I've seem some answers here and I tried to adapt my code accordingly.

datetime.datetime.strptime(df["x"],'%b %d, %Y %H:%M:%S %a').strftime('%d/%m/%Y %H:%M:%S')

But I get the following error:

strptime() argument 1 must be str, not Series

For this reason, I tried to convert to string using the following:

df['x'] = df['x'].apply(str)
df['x'] = df['x'].to_string()
df['x'] = df['x'].astype(str)

But it does not work.

Answer 1

I am assuming you are using pandas. You can use pandas to_datetime() function instead of datetimes functions which can only convert a single value for a given call. Also for AM/PM you need %p instead of %a

df['x'] = pd.to_datetime(df['x'], format="%b %d, %Y %H:%M:%S %p")

---

Edit

Check to make sure your data is exactly how you posted it. I copy and pasted your data, and created a data frame and it works without an error.

df = pd.DataFrame({'x':['Aug 1, 2019 7:20:04 AM','Aug 1, 2019 7:20:14 AM','Aug 1, 2019 7:20:24 AM','Aug 1, 2019 7:20:34 AM']})

Output:

                        x
0  Aug 1, 2019 7:20:04 AM
1  Aug 1, 2019 7:20:14 AM
2  Aug 1, 2019 7:20:24 AM
3  Aug 1, 2019 7:20:34 AM



df['x'] = pd.to_datetime(df['x'],format='%b %d, %Y %H:%M:%S %p')

Output:

                    x
0 2019-08-01 07:20:04
1 2019-08-01 07:20:14
2 2019-08-01 07:20:24
3 2019-08-01 07:20:34