How to read datetime with timezone in pandas

Question

I am trying to create a dataframe from csv, and its first column is like

"2013-08-25T00:00:00-0400";
"2013-08-25T01:00:00-0400";
"2013-08-25T02:00:00-0400";
"2013-08-25T03:00:00-0400";
"2013-08-25T04:00:00-0400";

It's datetime with timezone ! I already used something like

df1 = DataFrame(pd.read_csv(PeriodC, sep=';', parse_dates=[0], index_col=0))

but the result was

2013-09-02 04:00:00                                                                                    
2013-09-03 04:00:00                                                                                     
2013-09-04 04:00:00                                                                                     
2013-09-05 04:00:00                                                                                      
2013-09-06 04:00:00                                                                                     
2013-09-07 04:00:00                                                                                     
2013-09-08 04:00:00

Can anyone explain me how to seperate the datetime from timezone ?

Answer 1

Pandas parser will take into account the timezone information if it's available, and give you a naive Timestamp (naive == no timezone info), but with the timezone offset taken into account.

To keep the timezone information in you DataFrame you should first localize the Timestamps as UTC and then convert them to their timezone (which in this case is Etc/GMT+4):

>>> df = pd.read_csv(PeriodC, sep=';', parse_dates=[0], index_col=0)
>>> df.index[0]
>>> Timestamp('2013-08-25 04:00:00', tz=None)
>>> df.index = df.index.tz_localize('UTC').tz_convert('Etc/GMT+4')
>>> df.index[0]
Timestamp('2013-08-25 00:00:00-0400', tz='Etc/GMT+4')

If you want to completely discard the timezone information, then just specify a date_parser that will split the string and pass only the datetime portion to the parser.

>>> df = pd.read_csv(file, sep=';', parse_dates=[0], index_col=[0]
                     date_parser=lambda x: pd.to_datetime(x.rpartition('-')[0]))
>>> df.index[0]
Timestamp('2013-08-25 00:00:00', tz=None)