Converting String containing "\" into Date

Question

I'm attempting to convert a column of a dataframe from a string to a date, however the string contains "\". When scraping the data, it looks like so:

movie_data = pd.read_html("http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=daily&view=chart&id=everest2015.htm", 'r')

date = movie_data[6][1][2:]
print(date.head())

2    Sep\t. 18, 2015
3    Sep\t. 19, 2015
4    Sep\t. 20, 2015
5    Sep\t. 21, 2015

I want to iterate over this column to convert this string into a date, however I can't escape the syntax error I'm getting when trying to execute the following:

for d in date:
    date[d] = date[d].replace(".","")
    date[d] = date[d].replace("\","")
    date[d] = datetime.strptime(date[d], %M %D, %Y)
print(date)

Error:

  File "<ipython-input-51-eb78788bf83f>", line 14
    date[d] = date[d].replace("\","")
                                     ^
SyntaxError: EOL while scanning string literal

I realize that the character I'm using is used to escape quotations, but I have no idea how to use this character when referencing replace.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is because you are using escape character, so python assumes next " to be escaped, thereby causing unbalanced quotes and SyntaxError.

Escaping the character would fix the problem:-

date[d] = date[d].replace("\\","") # line no 14