pandas to_datetime function default year

Question

I am newbie about pandas, when I run below code, I got a different result:

import pandas as pd

ts = pd.to_datetime("2014-6-10 10:10:10.30",format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f")
print ts
ts = pd.to_datetime("6-10 10:10:10.30",format="%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f")
print ts

The output is:

2014-06-10 10:10:10.300000
1900-06-10 10:10:10.300000

That means the default year is 1900, how can I change it to 2014 for the second one?

Answer 1

You cannot write to the year attribute of a datetime, so the easiest thing to do is use replace:

In [57]:

ts = ts.replace(year=2014)
ts
Out[57]:
Timestamp('2014-06-10 10:10:10.300000')

Another possiblity is to store the current year as a string and prepend this as required, this has an advantage that you can use the same format string for all dates:

In [68]:

this_year = str(datetime.datetime.now().year)
datestr = this_year +'-' + '6-10 10:10:10.30'
pd.to_datetime(datestr,format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S.%f")
Out[68]:
Timestamp('2014-06-10 10:10:10.300000')

Can't think of a better way but you could wrap the above in a function to test if you need to set the year