Pandas: Data Manipulation - to_datetime() function

Last update on August 19 2022 21:50:50 (UTC/GMT +8 hours)

to_datetime() function

The to_datetime() function is used to convert argument to datetime.

Syntax:

pandas.to_datetime(arg, errors='raise', dayfirst=False, yearfirst=False, utc=None, format=None, exact=True, unit=None, infer_datetime_format=False, origin='unix', cache=True)

Parameters:

Name	Description	Type / Default Value	Required / Optional
arg	scalar, list, tuple,	1-d array, or Series	Required
errors	If 'raise', then invalid parsing will raise an exception If 'coerce', then invalid parsing will be set as NaN If 'ignore', then invalid parsing will return the input	{'ignore', 'raise', 'coerce'}, Default Value: 'raise'	Optional
dayfirst	Specify a date parse order if arg is str or its list-likes. If True, parses dates with the day first, eg 10/11/12 is parsed as 2012-11-10. Warning: dayfirst=True is not strict, but will prefer to parse with day first (this is a known bug, based on dateutil behavior).	boolean Default Value: False	Optional
yearfirst	Specify a date parse order if arg is str or its list-likes. If True parses dates with the year first, eg 10/11/12 is parsed as 2010-11-12. If both dayfirst and yearfirst are True, yearfirst is preceded (same as dateutil). Warning: yearfirst=True is not strict, but will prefer to parse with year first (this is a known bug, based on dateutil behavior).	boolean Default Value: False	Optional
utc	Return UTC DatetimeIndex if True (converting any tz-aware datetime.datetime objects as well).	boolean Default Value: None	Optional
format	trftime to parse time, eg “%d/%m/%Y”, note that “%f” will parse all the way up to nanoseconds. See strftime documentation for more information on choices:	string Default Value: None	Required
exact	If True, require an exact format match. If False, allow the format to match anywhere in the target string.	boolean Default Value: True	Required
unit	unit of the arg (D,s,ms,us,ns) denote the unit, which is an integer or float number. This will be based off the origin. Example, with unit=’ms’ and origin=’unix’ (the default), this would calculate the number of milliseconds to the unix epoch start	string Default Value: 'ns'	Required
infer_datetime_format	If True and no format is given, attempt to infer the format of the datetime strings, and if it can be inferred, switch to a faster method of parsing them. In some cases this can increase the parsing speed by ~5-10x.	boolean Default Value: False	Required
origin	Define the reference date. The numeric values would be parsed as number of units (defined by unit) since this reference date. If 'unix' (or POSIX) time; origin is set to 1970-01-01. If 'julian', unit must be 'D', and origin is set to beginning of Julian Calendar. Julian day number 0 is assigned to the day starting at noon on January 1, 4713 BC. If Timestamp convertible, origin is set to Timestamp identified by origin.	scalar Default Value: 'unix'	Required
cache	If True, use a cache of unique, converted dates to apply the datetime conversion. May produce significant speed-up when parsing duplicate date strings, especially ones with timezone offsets.	boolean Default Value: True	Required

Returns: datetime if parsing succeeded.
Return type depends on input:

list-like: DatetimeIndex
Series: Series of datetime64 dtype
scalar: Timestamp

Example:

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