Pandas Convert Series from DateTimeStamp to datetime.datetime object

Question

I have a pandas' dataframe with a column that is of datatype: datetime64[ns].

How do I convert the whole series to a Python's Datetime.datetime objects? On the individual object there is a function called to_datetime(), but I can't call this function on the series.

Thank you

It is really problematic, because it automatically cast to pandas datetimes, but is possible convert to `numpy array` of dates by `df.Date.dt.to_pydatetime()` — jezrael, Feb 06 '17 at 12:42
So this `df.Date = df.Date.dt.to_pydatetime()` still return `Date datetime64[ns]` — jezrael, Feb 06 '17 at 12:44
better it is explain [here](http://stackoverflow.com/a/23191196/2901002) — jezrael, Feb 06 '17 at 13:08

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 06 '17 at 14:00

2

If performance is a concern I would advise to use the following function to convert those columns to date_time:

def lookup(s):
    """
    This is an extremely fast approach to datetime parsing.
    For large data, the same dates are often repeated. Rather than
    re-parse these, we store all unique dates, parse them, and
    use a lookup to convert all dates.
    """
    dates = {date:pd.to_datetime(date) for date in s.unique()}
    return s.apply(lambda v: dates[v])

to_datetime: 5799 ms
dateutil:    5162 ms
strptime:    1651 ms
manual:       242 ms
lookup:        32 ms

edited Feb 06 '17 at 14:00

erip

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answered Feb 06 '17 at 13:53

SerialDev

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@erip great solution! Works very well. – code base 5000 Feb 07 '17 at 12:28
@codebase5000 It's not my solution! It's SerialDev's. – erip Feb 07 '17 at 12:29

Pandas Convert Series from DateTimeStamp to datetime.datetime object

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