Converting spanish date into python pandas datetime object with locale setting

Question

I've got 2 questions:

1. How can I convert a Spanish datetime 'ago122010' into 2010-08-12 using pandas. Is the format used in strptime correct?

I've tried the following:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL, 'es_ES.utf8')

from datetime import datetime as dt

df['date'] = dt.strptime(df['date'], '%b%d%Y')
df['date'] = df['date'].strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

but I'm getting the following error:

Error: unsupported locale setting

2. how can I convert this '20100812' to a datetime using pandas.

Answer 1

Think the issue is with the locale used. Also, check your formatting.

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'es_ES.UTF-8')

from datetime import datetime as dt
datetime_object = dt.strptime('20100812', '%Y%m%d')
datetime_object

Output:

datetime.datetime(2010, 8, 12, 0, 0)

Let me know if this solves your problem.

Tried few more examples.

# read a spanish datetime format
datetime_object = dt.strptime('martes 12 julio 2016', '%A %d %B %Y')
print(datetime_object.strftime("%B"))
print(datetime_object)

# Change the locale to swede and print the month
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_TIME, "sv_SE")  
print(datetime_object.strftime("%B"))

Output:

julio
2016-07-12 00:00:00
Juli

Edited to incorporate the specific details you wanted:

import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'es_ES.UTF-8')

from datetime import datetime as dt

datetime_object = dt.strptime('ago122010', '%b%d%Y')
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_ALL,'en_US.UTF-8')
print(datetime_object.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"))

Output

2010-08-12