String to DateTime in Python Correct Format error

Question

I know this question is out there quite a bit, but I cannot find a solution for my case. I have a DataFrame with a column Time in string format that I need to convert to datetime. Ultimately, I want the date as an int for ML purposes, but I cannot seem to get it to datetime first.

I have:

testDate = tripOrig[' Time'][0]
newDate = dt.datetime.strptime(testDate,'%d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S.%f %Z')

Where the dates are strings like:

05-Jun-2016 00:00:00.000 EDT

For whatever reason, I keep getting the error that it is in the wrong format. I cannot for the life of me figure out what I am doing wrong. I checked the datetime docs over many times but I keep getting:

ValueError: time data '05-Jun-2016 00:00:00.000 EDT' does not match format '%d-%b-%Y %H:%M:%S.%f %Z'

What am I missing here?!?

As another note, I have also tried:

tripOrig['correct date'] = pd.to_datetime(tripOrig[' Time'])

This is very slow, throws a timezone warning, and does not account for seconds when convert to int, so I cannot use it.

How can I get this converted?

the issue is with `EDT` it's not recognized, swap it with `UTC` and the code snippet works fine. You need to see the equivalent time zone for EDT recognized by datetime. — Hadi Farah, Oct 27 '21 at 14:32
According to this page: https://rdrr.io/r/base/strptime.html. `%Z` is output only. — Hadi Farah, Oct 27 '21 at 14:44
Does this answer your question? [Python strptime() and timezones?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3305413/python-strptime-and-timezones) — FObersteiner, Oct 27 '21 at 15:37
another potential duplicate: https://stackoverflow.com/q/67875823/10197418 — FObersteiner, Oct 28 '21 at 07:07

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 28 '21 at 16:19

Using a couple other questions, I found my solution:

Parser must be a string or character stream, not Series

how to convert a string datetime with unknown timezone to timestamp in python

From string to Posix/Unix int:

import datetime as dt
from time import mktime
from dateutil import parser

def timeCorrect(stringDate):
    stamp = parser.parse(stringDate, tzinfos={"EDT": -4 * 3600})
    work = mktime(stamp.timetuple())
    return work
        
tripOrig['Correct Time'] =  tripOrig[' Time'].apply(timeCorrect)

String to DateTime in Python Correct Format error

1 Answers1