Why does numpy.datetime64 give an error with an array of years?

Question

I am working with some data that has the date in the format 2017.08333. In the process of converting this to datetime objects I got an error when trying to convert the integer years to datetime.

np.datetime64(['2017','2018'])

The above fails with the error:Could not convert object to NumPy datetime

I was under the impression numpy functions were vectorized. Can someone explain why this doesn't work and how I can solve this? I have 3,000 dates to convert so something that doesn't involve a loop is ideal.

Answer 1

To create an array of dates, you could do:

import numpy as np

print(np.array(['2018', '2017'], dtype=np.datetime64))

Output

['2018' '2017']

A more detailed explanation can be found here