It is possible to parse dates when reading data into Pandas, this can be done by specifying the parse_dates argument and potentially providing a custom date parser function.
- This can be necessary if the data contains date-time values in different formats that are not natively supported by Pandas.
- You can use a lambda function to build a custom date parser that can handle the various formats present in the data.
- This allows you to properly read and interpret the dates when reading the data into pandas
Here is an example code that creates a custom date parser and specifies the parse_dates argument when importing a CSV file:
import pandas as pd
from datetime import datetime
dateparser = lambda date_val: datetime.strptime(date_val, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
df = pd.read_csv("data.csv", parse_dates=['datetime'], date_parser=dateparser)