How do you convert an object to time in python?
I've read loads of SO answers but can't find a clear solution. Show
I have this data in a df called
I want to convert it into a time format. But when I do this:
The result includes today's date:
It seems the Update The following formats the time correctly, but somehow the
column is still an object type. Why doesn't it convert to
October 31, 2019 Dealing with dates and times in Python can be a
hassle. Thankfully, there’s a built-in way of making it easier: the Python datetime module. In short, it’s a really powerful way of
handling anything date and time related in Python. So let’s get into it! In this tutorial, we’ll learn about python datetime functions in detail, including: As you work through this tutorial, we’d encourage you to run the code on your own machine. Alternatively, if you’d like to run code
in your browser and learn in an interactive fashion with answer-checking to be sure you’re getting it right, our Python intermediate course has a lesson on datetime in Python that we recommend. You can start learning by signing up for a free user
account. Get that next raise or to switch to a career in data science by learning data skills. Sign up for a free account and try our interactive courses in Python, R, SQL, and more! Before jumping into writing code, it’s worth looking at the five main object classes that are used in the If those distinctions don’t make sense yet, don’t worry! Let’s dive into First, let’s take a closer look at a Then, we’ll print the current date and time to take a closer look at what’s contained in a We can see from the results above that Now we’ve seen what makes up a We can also antipate some problems. For example, in
most data sets, date and time information is stored in string format! Also, we may not want all of this date and time data — if we’re doing something like a monthly sales analysis, breaking things down by microsecond isn’t going to be very useful. So now, let’s start digging into a common task in data science: extracting only the elements that we actually want from a string using To do this, we need to do a few things. Handling Date and Time Strings with strptime() and strftime()Thankfully, Of course,
Note that A full list of these patterns is available in the documentation, and we’ll go into these methods in more depth later in this tutorial. You may also have noticed that a time
of Anyway, we were hoping to separate out specific elements of the date for our analysis. One way can do that using the built-in class attributes of a datetime object, like
Learn Python the Right Way.Learn Python by writing Python code from day one, right in your browser window. It's the best way to learn Python — see for yourself with one of our 60+ free lessons. Try Dataquest Getting Day of the Month and Day of the Week from a DateLet’s do some more extraction, because that’s a really common task. This time, we’ll try to get the day of the month and the day of the week from We’ll start by importing
Wait a minute, that looks a bit odd! The third day of the week should be Wednesday, not Thursday, right? Let’s take a closer look at that
Now we can see that Python starts weeks on Monday and counts from the index 0 rather than starting at 1. So it makes sense that the number 3 is converted to “Thursday” as we saw above. Getting Hours and Minutes From a Python Datetime ObjectNow let’s dig into time and extract the hours and minutes from datetime object. Much like what we did above with month and year, we can use class attributes Let’s set a new date and time using the
Getting Week of the Year from a Datetime ObjectWe can also do fancier things with We can get the year, week of the year, and day of the week from a Specifically,
Note that in the ISO calendar, the week starts counting from 1, so here 5 represents the correct day of the week: Friday. We can see from the above that this is the 43rd week of the year, but if we wanted to isolate that number, we could do so with indexing just as we might for any other Python list or tuple:
43 Converting a Date Object into Unix Timestamp and Vice VersaIn programming, it’s not uncommon to encounter time and date data that’s stored as a timestamp, or to want to store your own data in Unix timestamp format. We can do that using datetime’s built-in
Similarly, we can do the reverse conversion using
Measuring Time Span with Timedelta ObjectsOften, we may want to measure a span of time, or a duration, using Python datetime. We can do this with its built-in By default a timedelta object has all parameters set to zero. Let’s create a new timedelta object that’s two weeks long and see how that looks:
Note that we can get our time duration in days by using the Let’s create another timedelta duration to get a bit more practice:
Now let’s start doing using timedelta objects together with datetime objects to do some math! Specifically, let’s add a few diffeent time durations to the current time and date to see what date it will be after 15 days, what date it was two weeks ago. To do this, we can use the (Note: in the code below, it’s October 25 at 11:12 AM; your results will differ depending on when you run the code since we’re getting our
Note that the output of these mathematical operations is still a Learn Data SkillsGet that next raise or to switch to a career in data science by learning data skills. Sign up for a free account and try our interactive courses in Python, R, SQL, and more! Find the Difference Between Two Dates and TimesSimilar to what we did above, we can also subtract one date from another date to find the timespan between them using datetime. Because the result of this math is a duration, the object produced when we subtract one date from another will be a Here, we’ll create two
Above, we used only dates for the sake of clarity, but we can do the same
thing with
Formatting Dates: More on strftime() and strptime()We
touched briefly on
Note that it takes two arguments:
Let’s try converting a different kind of date string this time. This site is a really useful reference for finding the formatting codes needed to help
Now let’s do something a bit more advanced to practice everything we’ve learned so far! We’ll start with a date in string format, convert it to a datetime object, and look at a couple different ways of formatting it (dd/mm and mm/dd). Then, sticking with the mm/dd formatting, we’ll convert it into a Unix timestamp. Then we’ll convert it back into a
Here’s an image you can save with a cheat sheet for common, useful strptime and strftime patterns: Let’s get a little more practice using these:
Handling TimezonesWorking with dates and times in Pythin can get even more complicated when timezones get involved. Thankfully, the We can use the For example:
This module can help make life simpler when working with data sets that include multiple different time zones. Working with pandas Datetime ObjectsData scientists love We can convert date, time, and duration text strings into pandas Datetime objects using these functions:
And as we’ll see, these functions are actually quite good at converting strings to Python datetime objects by detecting their format automatically, without needing us to define it using strftime patterns. Let’s look at a quick example:
Note that even though we gave it a string with some complicating factors like a “th” and “sep” rather than “Sep.” or “September”, pandas was able to correctly parse the string and return a formatted date. We can also use pandas (and some of its affiliated numpy functionality) to create date ranges automatically as pandas Series. Below, for example, we create a series of twelve dates starting from the day we defined above. Then we create a different series of dates starting from a predefined date using
Get Year, Month, Day, Hour, Minute in pandasWe can easily get year, month, day, hour, or
minute from dates in a column of a pandas dataframe using To explore this, let’s make a quick DataFrame using one of the Series we created above:
Now, let’s create separate columns for each element of the date by using the relevant Python datetime (accessed with
Get Weekday and Day of YearPandas is also capable of getting other elements, like the day of the week and the day of the year, from its datetime objects. Again, we can use
Convert Date Object into DataFrame IndexWe can also use pandas to make a datetime column into the index of our DataFrame. This can be very helpful for tasks like exploratory data visualization, because matplotlib will recognize that the DataFrame index is a time series and plot the data accordingly. To do this, all we have to do is redefine
ConclusionIn this tutorial, we’ve taken a deep dive into Python datetime, and also done some work with pandas and the calendar module. We’ve covered a lot, but remember: the best way to learn something is by actually writing code yourself! If you’d like to practice writing Could you benefit from building new skills?Pick a skill below and click to sign up for free and start learning instantly! How do you convert an object to a date and time in Python?The date column is indeed a string, which—remember—is denoted as an object type in Python. You can convert it to the datetime type with the . to_datetime() method in pandas .
How do you convert time format in Python?Use datetime. strftime(format) to convert a datetime object into a string as per the corresponding format . The format codes are standard directives for mentioning in which format you want to represent datetime. For example, the %d-%m-%Y %H:%M:%S codes convert date to dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss format.
How do you convert a number to time in Python?“how to convert number to time in python” Code Answer. time = 72.345.. hours = int(time). minutes = (time*60) % 60.. seconds = (time*3600) % 60.. print("%d:%02d.%02d" % (hours, minutes, seconds)). >> 72:20:42.. How do you convert columns to time in Python?Use pandas to_datetime() function to convert the column to DateTime on DataFrame. Use the format parameter of this method to specify the pattern of the DateTime string you wanted to convert.
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