Convert date-like string to date format in python

Question

I have a dataframe with a column called date, formatted as string and it looks like this:

date
20200109
20200304
20210112

Is there a way I can format that into datetime?

Answer 1

You can use pd.to_datetime with custom format=:

df["date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["date"], format="%Y%d%m")  # use "%Y%m%d" if month is first
print(df)

Prints:

        date
0 2020-09-01
1 2020-04-03
2 2021-12-01

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^{Note: datetime format cheatsheet}