Convert Python object column in dataframe to time without date using Pandas - python

I have a column in my dataframe that lists time in HH:MM:SS. When I run dtype on the column, it comes up with dtype('o') and I want to be able to use it as the x-axis for plotting some of my other signals. I saw previous documentation on using to_datetime and tried to use that to convert it to a usable time format for matplotlib.
Used pandas version is 0.18.1
I used:
time=pd.to_datetime(df.Time,format='%H:%M:%S')
where the output then becomes:
time
0 1900-01-01 00:00:01
and is carried out for the rest of the data points in the column.
Even though I specified just hour,minutes,and seconds I am still getting date. Why is that? I also tried
time.hour()
just to extract the hour portion but then I get an error that it doesn't have an 'hour' attribute.
Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!

Now in 2019, using pandas 0.25.0 and Python 3.7.3.
(Note : Edited answer to take plotting in account)
Even though I specified just hour,minutes,and seconds I am still getting date. Why is that?
According to pandas documentation I think it's because in a pandas Timestamp (equivalent of Datetime) object, the arguments year, month and day are mandatory, while hour, minutes and seconds are optional.
Therefore if you convert your object-type object in a Datetime, it must have a year-month-day part - if you don't indicate one, it will be the default 1900-01-01.
Since you also have a Date column in your sample, you can use it to have a datetime column with the right dates that you can use to plot :
import pandas as pd
df['Time'] = df.Date + " " + df.Time
df['Time'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Time'], format='%m/%d/%Y %H:%M:%S')
df.plot('Time', subplots=True)
With this your 'Time' column will display values like : 2016-07-25 01:12:07 and its dtype is datetime64[ns].
That being said, IF you plot day by day and you only want to compare times within a day (and not dates+times), having a default date does not seem bothering as long as it's the same date for all times - the times will be correctly compared on a same day, be it a wrong one.
And in the least likely case you would still want a time-only column, this is the reverse operation :
import pandas as pd
df['Time-only'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Time'], format='%H:%M:%S').dt.time
As explained before, it doesn't have a date (year-month-day) so it cannot be a datetime object, therefore this column will be in Object format.

You can extract a time object like:
import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame([['12:10:20']], columns={"time": "item"})
time = pd.to_datetime(df.time, format='%H:%M:%S').dt.time[0]
After which you can extract desired properties as:
hour = time.hour
(Source)

Related

Change timedelta64[ns[ to string

I have both Date and Time which is being imported from MySQL. The Date column is object type while Time is timedelta64[ns] type. I wanted to combine them and put it as an index column on the DataFrame, so that I could put it as x-axis labels in the graphs. I tried a lot of ways but nothing seems to work out for me. Is there any way to do this effectively?
We first have to cast the object type to a datetime object:
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])
Then we can just add the time difference to the date by using:
df['Datetime'] = df['Date'] + df['Time']

Convert multiple columns to Datetime at once keeping just the time

Trying to change multiple columns to the same datatype at once,
columns contain time data like hours minute and seconds, like
And the data
and I'm not able to change multiple columns at once to using pd.to_datetime to only the time format, I don't want the date because, if I do pd.to_datetime the date also gets added to the column which is not required, just want the time
how to convert the column to DateTime and only keep time in the column
First You can't have a datetime with only time in it in pandas/python.
So
Because python time is object in pandas convert all columns to datetimes (but there are also dates):
cols = ['Total Break Time','col1','col2']
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(pd.to_datetime)
Or convert columns to timedeltas, it looks like similar times, but possible working by datetimelike methods in pandas:
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(pd.to_timedelta)
You can pick only time as below:
import time
df['Total Break Time'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Total Break Time'],format= '%H:%M:%S' ).dt.time
Then you can repeat this for all your columns, as I suppose you already are.
The catch is, to convert to datetime and then only picking out what you need.

Dynamic Date Range Data slicing

I am trying to create a weekly report on Jupyter notebook for a data set that is being pulled from SQL database. I need to slice data based on date range from the data set.
Data is being pulled for last 60 days from the current date but I need to pull data (based on data completeness/others) for 30 days in between. To do this I was using the following code
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
today = datetime.now().date()
start = today - timedelta(days=10)
end = start- timedelta(days=30)
Df5= Df5.loc[start : end]
The last part of the code, gives the following error:
TypeError: '<' not supported between instances of 'int' and
'datetime.date'
Is this the most efficient way to slice the data? I am new to python and this is the first time working on real world data so any advice would be much appreciated. Thanks!
Your .loc statement will only work if the index of Df5 is a DatetimeIndex. From the error, it appears your index is an int type.
If you have a datetime column in Df5, then you need to set that as the index:
Df5.set_index("name_of_date_column", inplace=True) and then use your .loc statement.
Or, you can change the .loc statement to use the column with the date:
Df5.loc[Df5["name_of_date_column"].between(left=start, right=end)]
Either way, you need to be comparing start and end to datetime data types.

Faster solution for date formatting

I am trying to change the format of the date in a pandas dataframe.
If I check the date in the beginning, I have:
df['Date'][0]
Out[158]: '01/02/2008'
Then, I use:
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.date
To change the format to
df['Date'][0]
Out[157]: datetime.date(2008, 1, 2)
However, this takes a veeeery long time, since my dataframe has millions of rows.
All I want to do is change the date format from MM-DD-YYYY to YYYY-MM-DD.
How can I do it in a faster way?
You should first collapse by Date using the groupby method to reduce the dimensionality of the problem.
Then you parse the dates into the new format and merge the results back into the original DataFrame.
This requires some time because of the merging, but it takes advantage from the fact that many dates are repeated a large number of times. You want to convert each date only once!
You can use the following code:
date_parser = lambda x: pd.datetime.strptime(str(x), '%m/%d/%Y')
df['date_index'] = df['Date']
dates = df.groupby(['date_index']).first()['Date'].apply(date_parser)
df = df.set_index([ 'date_index' ])
df['New Date'] = dates
df = df.reset_index()
df.head()
In my case, the execution time for a DataFrame with 3 million lines reduced from 30 seconds to about 1.5 seconds.
I'm not sure if this will help with the performance issue, as I haven't tested with a dataset of your size, but at least in theory, this should help. Pandas has a built in parameter you can use to specify that it should load a column as a date or datetime field. See the parse_dates parameter in the pandas documentation.
Simply pass in a list of columns that you want to be parsed as a date and pandas will convert the columns for you when creating the DataFrame. Then, you won't have to worry about looping back through the dataframe and attempting the conversion after.
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('test.csv', parse_dates=[0,2])
The above example would try to parse the 1st and 3rd (zero-based) columns as dates.
The type of each resulting column value will be a pandas timestamp and you can then use pandas to print this out however you'd like when working with the dataframe.
Following a lead at #pygo's comment, I found that my mistake was to try to read the data as
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.date
This would be, as this answer explains:
This is because pandas falls back to dateutil.parser.parse for parsing the strings when it has a non-default format or when no format string is supplied (this is much more flexible, but also slower).
As you have shown above, you can improve the performance by supplying a format string to to_datetime. Or another option is to use infer_datetime_format=True
When using any of the date parsers from the answers above, we go into the for loop. Also, when specifying the format we want (instead of the format we have) in the pd.to_datetime, we also go into the for loop.
Hence, instead of doing
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'],format='%Y-%m-%d')
or
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date']).dt.date
we should do
df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'],format='%m/%d/%Y').dt.date
By supplying the current format of the data, it is read really fast into datetime format. Then, using .dt.date, it is fast to change it to the new format without the parser.
Thank you to everyone who helped!

Issue with pandas to_datetime function

I have a column that is unix timestamps. I want to convert this column to just dates in a %y-%m-%d format. Just to test the to_datetime() function I did the below, which works as expected and gives me the column in a format like this 2015-05-12 00:11:30 :
df['time'] = pd.to_datetime(df['time'], unit='s')
When I add in the format argument Like below, I get an error:
df['time'] = pd.to_datetime(df['time'], unit='s', format='%d/%m/%Y')
The error is ValueError: time data 1431389490 does not match format '%d/%m/%Y'
How can I strip off the hours, minutes and seconds so I am only left with 2014-05-12?
If you want to extract just the date, you can do that in a second step after converting to datetime:
x = pd.to_datetime(pd.Series([1431389490]), unit='s')
# Datetime columns have a `.dt` attribute, with useful properties
# and methods for working with dates
x.dt.date
Out[7]:
0 2015-05-12
dtype: object
This will discard the information about hours and minutes, but you will be able to work with the resulting column/series easily because the result is a datetime.date object, e.g. subtracting to find the number of days between your column and a certain date.
If you want to keep the information about hours and minutes, but only display it differently, I'm not sure that's possible.

Categories

Resources