How do I fill in missing dates with zeros for a pandas groupby list?

Question

I am looking to take a daily record of transactions and account for days when 0 transactions occurred.

Here is my initial dataframe:

df.head()
tr_timestamp  text      location
2016-01-01    cookies   TX
2016-01-01    pizza     TX
2016-01-04    apples    TX
2016-01-08    bread     TX

When I run a group by day, I get the following:

df_by_day = df['tr_timestamp'].groupby(df.tr_timestamp).count()
df_by_day

tr_timestamp
2016-01-01  2
2016-01-04  1
2016-01-08  1

I'm looking to use Python/Pandas where dates without a transaction are filled such that I get the following output:

df_by_day_filled

tr_timestamp
2016-01-01  2
2016-01-02  0
2016-01-03  0
2016-01-04  1
2016-01-05  0
2016-01-06  0
2016-01-07  0
2016-01-08  1

I've tried the following answers, which don't quite give the output I need returned:

Pandas groupby for zero values

Fill Missing Dates in DataFrame with Duplicate Dates in Groupby

Thanks.

Answer 1

You can also try:

df_by_day.asfreq('D', fill_value=0)

Output:

tr_timestamp
2016-01-01    2
2016-01-02    0
2016-01-03    0
2016-01-04    1
2016-01-05    0
2016-01-06    0
2016-01-07    0
2016-01-08    1
Freq: D, Name: tr_timestamp, dtype: int64

Answer 2

This is a resample operation:

df.set_index(pd.to_datetime(df.pop('tr_timestamp'))).resample('D')['text'].count()

tr_timestamp
2016-01-01    2
2016-01-02    0
2016-01-03    0
2016-01-04    1
2016-01-05    0
2016-01-06    0
2016-01-07    0
2016-01-08    1
Freq: D, Name: text, dtype: int64

The pd.to_datetime call ensures this works if "tr_timestamp" is not a datetime. If it is, then the solution simplifies to

df.dtypes

tr_timestamp    datetime64[ns]
text                    object
location                object
dtype: object

df.set_index('tr_timestamp').resample('D')['text'].count()

tr_timestamp
2016-01-01    2
2016-01-02    0
2016-01-03    0
2016-01-04    1
2016-01-05    0
2016-01-06    0
2016-01-07    0
2016-01-08    1
Freq: D, Name: text, dtype: int64