removing time from date&time variable in pandas?

Question

i have a variable consisting of 300k records with dates and the date look like
2015-02-21 12:08:51
from that date i want to remove time

type of date variable is pandas.core.series.series

This is the way i tried

from datetime import datetime,date date_str = textdata['vfreceiveddate']   format_string = "%Y-%m-%d" then = datetime.strftime(date_str,format_string)    

some Random ERROR

In the above code textdata is my datasetname and vfreceived date is a variable consisting of dates
How can i write the code to remove the time from the datetime.

Answer 1

Assuming all your datetime strings are in a similar format then just convert them to datetime using to_datetime and then call the dt.date attribute to get just the date portion:

In [37]:  df = pd.DataFrame({'date':['2015-02-21 12:08:51']}) df Out[37]:                   date 0  2015-02-21 12:08:51 In [39]:  df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']).dt.date df Out[39]:          date 0  2015-02-21 

EDIT

If you just want to change the display and not the dtype then you can call dt.normalize:

In[10]: df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']).dt.normalize() df  Out[10]:          date 0 2015-02-21 

You can see that the dtype remains as datetime:

In[11]: df.dtypes  Out[11]:  date    datetime64[ns] dtype: object