Currently my data has date as 01JAN2017, how do I make pandas understand this as date type, i need the data to be in date type for filtering it for various time frames.
i used the below
data=pd.read_csv(input_path + 'data.txt',sep='|', parse_dates=['week'])
but when i checked for the datatype for week it still shows as object.
Would be very helpful if you can also direct me to some other links so that i could read up more about this
You can use datetime.strptime() to parse a date string into a datetime object:
>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> datetime.strptime("01JAN2017", "%d%b%Y")
>>> datetime.datetime(2017, 1, 1, 0, 0)
Now, to make pandas recognize the format, you could add a date parser function:
dateparse = lambda dates: [pd.datetime.strptime(d, "%d%b%Y") for d in dates]
df = pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates=["week"], date_parser=dateparse)