I have a dataset that has a series containing dates in it, however, the problem I am facing with this dates data is that they are in the format of year-month (for example, 2022-01), and for my analysis, I want them in the format of year-month-day. I don’t know the exact day for each record I have in the dataset but I want the days to be consistent for each year-month date I have, for example, I want every year-month date to have the day as the 4th day. Are there methods available to do this? If there are please provide them below with examples.
Yes, you can use “to_datetime()” method, which is used to convert an input series or list of date-like objects to a Pandas DatetimeIndex object.
In this method, to_datetime() is used to convert the year-month string series to a DatetimeIndex object, and the year-month strings are concatenated with -04 to ensure that each resulting date has the same day number.
Hello @mubashir_rizvi , the datetime module in Python provides classes for working with dates and times. It provides functions for parsing, formatting, and manipulating dates and times. The strptime() is a method of the datetime class and is used to parse a string representation of a date and time using a specified format string.
In the above code, strptime() is used to parse each year-month string in the series, concatenate -04 to each element in it, and return a date-time series object. This method is incorporated in a simple lambda function which is applied to each element of the series using the apply() function.
Hey @mubashir_rizvi , the Arrow library is a Python library used for working with dates and times, similar to the datetime module in Python’s standard library. The arrow.get() method is used to parse a string representation of a date and time using a specified format string. In this case, get() is used to parse each year-month string in the series, concatenate -04 to each element in the series, and return an Arrow object for that month with the day number set to 4. The method get() is used in a simple lambda function which is applied to each element of the series using the apply() method.