Selecting datetime column names in pandas dataframe

Question

I read an excel file using pandas read_excel with parse_dates=True . Below are the columns of the dataframe:

df_source.columns:

Index([          'Country',    'Cost Component',            'Source',
       'Internal/External',          2019-01-01,          2019-02-01,
                2019-03-01,          2019-04-01,          2019-05-01,
                2019-06-01,          2019-07-01,          2019-08-01,
                2019-09-01,          2019-10-01,          2019-11-01,
                2019-12-01,          2020-01-01,          2020-02-01,
                2020-03-01,          2020-04-01,          2020-05-01,
                2020-06-01,          2020-07-01,          2020-08-01,
                2020-09-01,          2020-10-01,          2020-11-01,
                2020-12-01,          2021-01-01,          2021-02-01,
                2021-03-01,          2021-04-01,          2021-05-01,
                2021-06-01,          2021-07-01,          2021-08-01,
                2021-09-01,          2021-10-01,          2021-11-01,
                2021-12-01,          2022-01-01,          2022-02-01,
                2022-03-01,          2022-04-01,          2022-05-01,
                2022-06-01,          2022-07-01,          2022-08-01,
                2022-09-01,          2022-10-01,          2022-11-01,
                2022-12-01,          2023-01-01,          2023-02-01,
                2023-03-01,          2023-04-01,          2023-05-01,
                2023-06-01,          2023-07-01,          2023-08-01,
                2023-09-01,          2023-10-01,          2023-11-01,
                2023-12-01,          2024-01-01,          2024-02-01,
                2024-03-01,          2024-04-01,          2024-05-01,
                2024-06-01,          2024-07-01,          2024-08-01,
                2024-09-01,          2024-10-01,          2024-11-01,
                2024-12-01],
      dtype='object')

Now i want to filter values from those specific columns as per the below code:

df_Source[[col for col in df_Source.columns if col not in ('Country', 'Cost Component', 'Source', 'Internal/External') 
           and col >= datetime(2021,7,1)
           and col <= datetime(2022,6,1)]]

But this is giving me an error:

TypeError: '>=' not supported between instances of 'datetime.date' and 'str'

When the column names are datetime format, why does the above code not work?

Answer 1

Doesn't look like the columns are being converted to datetime on import.

Try doing this for your date columns after import:

df['Source'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Source']).apply(lambda x: x.date())