How to convert yyyymmdd date to proper format in pandas?

Question

I've tried to convert a series of date where the format is yyyymmdd to executable pandas datetime format.

20180331 to 2018-03-31

Timestamp method is giving error.

Answer 1

You can use pandas to_datetime to convert

pd.to_datetime('20180331 ')

Out:

Timestamp('2018-03-31 00:00:00')

and you can make use of strip time to extract your required information of days, month ,year etc

%m - month of timestamp
%y - year with last 2 digts
%Y - year of timestamp
%d - date of timestamp
%H - hours of timestmap
%M - minutes of timestamp


pd.to_datetime('20180331 ').strftime('%Y:%m:%d')

Out:

'2018:03:31'