How to remove characters from timestamps in a dataframe in Python

Question

I am trying to remove the brackets and apostrophes from a dataframe in pandas, so that I can further parse the timestamp, which is in this format: YYYY/MM/DD:HH:MM:SS.

The code I'm using looks like this:

finallog = newerlog.split()
ts = finallog[0::6]
ip = finallog[1::6]
proxy = finallog[3::6]
refurl = finallog[4::6]
requrl = finallog[5::6]

An example of an erroneous timestamp at the beginning of the dataframe is: ['2020/11/13:02:16:43 There are others in the dataframe that have an apostrophe, such as '2020/11/14:10:14:16 Of course, the final element has the closing inverse as the beginning example ']

Any advice on how to remove these? The timestamps need to be uniform length if I am to slice them further.

Answer 1

if you know all the erroneous characters already:

element = '["2020/11/13:02:16:43'
clean_element = element.replace('[', '').replace('"', '').replace("'", '').replace(']', '')

>> '2020/11/13:02:16:43'