Converting a string month day, year to mm/dd/yyyy

Question

I need to covert a string which contains date information (eg, November 3, 2020 ) into date format (ie, 11/03/2020 ). I wrote

df['Date']=pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).map(lambda x: x.strftime('%m/%d/%y'))

where Date is

November 3, 2020
June 26, 2002
July 02, 2010

and many other dates, but I found the error ValueError: NaTType does not support strftime.

Answer 1

You can use pandas.Series.dt.strftime , which handles the NaT :

import pandas as pd

dates = ['November 3, 2020',
         'June 26, 2002',
         'July 02, 2010',
         'NaT']

dates = pd.to_datetime(dates)
df = pd.DataFrame(dates, columns=['Date'])
df['Date'] = df['Date'].dt.strftime('%m/%d/%y')

Output:

       Date
0  11/03/20
1  06/26/02
2  07/02/10
3       NaN