Parsing date with French month abbreviations

Question

I have a pandas dataframe with the date column containing dates with month abbreviations in French, such as:

u'18-oct.-2015'
u'12-nov.-2015'
u'02-d\xe9c.-2015'
u'26-janv.-2016'
u'02-f\xe9vr.-2016'
u'31-mai-2016'
u'01-juin-2016'

What is the proper way of using to_datetime to parse them?

Answer 1

I suspect that you can just set your locale:

import locale

locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'fr_FR') # Windows may be a different locale name

# do your pandas read here

You might need to tell Pandas that that column is a datetime column... though it's also possible that you'll need to fix the column values - jan is the appropriate abbreviation for janvier. But Pandas may be smart enough to handle it.