datetime to string with series in pandas

Question

How should I transform from datetime to string? My attempt:

dates = p.to_datetime(p.Series(['20010101', '20010331']), format = '%Y%m%d') dates.str 

Answer 1

There is no .str accessor for datetimes and you can't do .astype(str) either.

Instead, use .dt.strftime:

>>> series = pd.Series(['20010101', '20010331']) >>> dates = pd.to_datetime(series, format='%Y%m%d') >>> dates.dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') 0    2001-01-01 1    2001-03-31 dtype: object 

See the docs on customizing date string formats here: strftime() and strptime() Behavior.

---

For old pandas versions <0.17.0, one can instead can call .apply with the Python standard library's datetime.strftime:

>>> dates.apply(lambda x: x.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')) 0    2001-01-01 1    2001-03-31 dtype: object 

Answer 2

As of pandas version 0.17.0, you can format with the dt accessor:

dates.dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')