Get an index label as a string in Pandas

Question

I have a Pandas dataframe, the index/labels are date. I just want to get out the starting date (ie the first entry) and the ending date (ie the last entry). What is the best way to do that?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

You could use the index's format method. For example,

In [44]: df = pd.DataFrame({'foo':1}, index=pd.date_range('2000-1-1', periods=5, freq='D'))

In [45]: df
Out[45]: 
            foo
2000-01-01    1
2000-01-02    1
2000-01-03    1
2000-01-04    1
2000-01-05    1

[5 rows x 1 columns]

In [46]: df.index[[0,-1]].format()
Out[46]: ['2000-01-01', '2000-01-05']