python/pandas: convert month int to month name

Question

Most of the info I found was not in python>pandas>dataframe hence the question.

I want to transform an integer between 1 and 12 into an abbrieviated month name.

I have a df which looks like:

   client Month 1  sss    02 2  yyy    12 3  www    06 

I want the df to look like this:

   client Month 1  sss    Feb 2  yyy    Dec 3  www    Jun 

Answer 1

You can do this efficiently with combining calendar.month_abbr and df[col].apply()

import calendar df['Month'] = df['Month'].apply(lambda x: calendar.month_abbr[x]) 

Answer 2

Since the abbreviated month names is the first three letters of their full names, we could first convert the Month column to datetime and then use dt.month_name() to get the full month name and finally use str.slice() method to get the first three letters, all using pandas and only in one line of code:

df['Month'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Month'], format='%m').dt.month_name().str.slice(stop=3)  df    Month client 0   Feb sss 1   Dec yyy 2   Jun www