Dataframe has string column with date values in different formats. how to convert entire column data to single date format?

Question

converting string to datetime in python pandas with multiple date formats in a column.

Dataframe startdate has date values in 'mm-dd-YYYY hh:mm' format and 'mm/dd/YYYY hh:mm' format. I have used following query

  df['START_DATE*'] = pd.to_datetime(df['START_DATE*'], format= '%m-%d-%Y hh:mm')

START_DATE* is the column name.giving following

time data '01-01-2016 21:11' does not match format '%m-%d-%Y hh:mm' (match)

Answer 1

hh:mm does not mean hour:minute . Try:

df['START_DATE*'] = pd.to_datetime(df['START_DATE*'], format= '%m-%d-%Y %H:%M')