how to make interpret date as 3 12 not 31 2 in ddmmyyyy format

Question

my date format come in format 11122020 (ddmmyyyy) in a pandas column.

I use

datapdf["wholetime"]=pd.to_datetime(datapdf["wholetime"],format='%d%m%Y)  

to convert to time and do processing on the time.

recently my code failed for date 3122020 as

ValueError: day is out of range for month

python is interpreting as 31 2 2020 instead of 3 12 2020 which is causing the error. Any one have solution for this?

Answer 1

One way would be to use str.zfill to ensure that date is in 8 digits:

s = pd.Series(["11122020", "3122020"])
pd.to_datetime(s.str.zfill(8), format="%d%m%Y")

Output:

0   2020-12-11
1   2020-12-03
dtype: datetime64[ns]

Note that this answer only concerns about missing 0 in the day. It won't be able to parse more ambiguous items such as 332020, where the month part also requires heading 0.