Datetime defaulting to 1970 in pandas

Question

I am having issues converting my date in the right format.

I have a column that looks like this: 20130525, stored as an int64.

I am trying to set it up as a date, but having issues.

I wrote a function that looks like this:

def reformat_dates(df):
    df['column'] = pd.to_datetime(df['column'], format = "%Y-%m-%d")

    return df

but when I execute the function, I end up with a column like this:

1970-01-01 00:00:00.020130525

Is there something wrong with my function that makes it default this way? I would like the format to be

2013-05-25

Answer 1

I think the column that you are converting is in UNIX timestamp format.

You should use unit='s'.

def reformat_dates(df):
    df['column'] = pd.to_datetime(df['column'], unit='s')
    return df

Answer 2

Can this be useful?

df['column'] = pd.to_datetime(df['column'], format = "%Y%m%d").dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')