TypeError: strptime() argument 1 must be str, not Series

Question

I am trying to apply strptime to a pandas series like the following:

    df['inward_date'] = datetime.strptime(df['inward_date'][:10], "%Y-%m-%d").strftime("%d-%m-%Y")

but it gives the above stated error. I can apply the loop and change it one by one but what is the more pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

You need to apply this conversion operation for every row item of your DataFrame, therefore use df.apply function eg to create a new pd.Series object and then assign it to the needed column.

df['inward_date'] = df['inward_date'].apply(lambda x: datetime.strptime(x[:10], "%Y-%m-%d").strftime("%d-%m-%Y"))

Answer 2

Pandas has a simple conversion method:

import pandas as pd
# convert the 'Date' column to datetime format
df['Date']= pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])