pandas.to_datetime — pandas 0.24.0rc1 documentation (original) (raw)

Parameters:

arg : integer, float, string, datetime, list, tuple, 1-d array, Series

New in version 0.18.1: or DataFrame/dict-like

errors : {‘ignore’, ‘raise’, ‘coerce’}, default ‘raise’

• If ‘raise’, then invalid parsing will raise an exception
• If ‘coerce’, then invalid parsing will be set as NaT
• If ‘ignore’, then invalid parsing will return the input

dayfirst : boolean, default False

Specify a date parse order if arg is str or its list-likes. If True, parses dates with the day first, eg 10/11/12 is parsed as 2012-11-10. Warning: dayfirst=True is not strict, but will prefer to parse with day first (this is a known bug, based on dateutil behavior).

yearfirst : boolean, default False

Specify a date parse order if arg is str or its list-likes.

• If True parses dates with the year first, eg 10/11/12 is parsed as 2010-11-12.
• If both dayfirst and yearfirst are True, yearfirst is preceded (same as dateutil).

Warning: yearfirst=True is not strict, but will prefer to parse with year first (this is a known bug, based on dateutil behavior).

New in version 0.16.1.

utc : boolean, default None

Return UTC DatetimeIndex if True (converting any tz-aware datetime.datetime objects as well).

box : boolean, default True

• If True returns a DatetimeIndex or Index-like object
• If False returns ndarray of values.

format : string, default None

strftime to parse time, eg “%d/%m/%Y”, note that “%f” will parse all the way up to nanoseconds.

exact : boolean, True by default

• If True, require an exact format match.
• If False, allow the format to match anywhere in the target string.

unit : string, default ‘ns’

unit of the arg (D,s,ms,us,ns) denote the unit, which is an integer or float number. This will be based off the origin. Example, with unit=’ms’ and origin=’unix’ (the default), this would calculate the number of milliseconds to the unix epoch start.

infer_datetime_format : boolean, default False

If True and no format is given, attempt to infer the format of the datetime strings, and if it can be inferred, switch to a faster method of parsing them. In some cases this can increase the parsing speed by ~5-10x.

origin : scalar, default is ‘unix’

Define the reference date. The numeric values would be parsed as number of units (defined by unit) since this reference date.

• If ‘unix’ (or POSIX) time; origin is set to 1970-01-01.
• If ‘julian’, unit must be ‘D’, and origin is set to beginning of Julian Calendar. Julian day number 0 is assigned to the day starting at noon on January 1, 4713 BC.
• If Timestamp convertible, origin is set to Timestamp identified by origin.

New in version 0.20.0.

cache : boolean, default False

If True, use a cache of unique, converted dates to apply the datetime conversion. May produce significant speed-up when parsing duplicate date strings, especially ones with timezone offsets.

New in version 0.23.0.