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I’m working on a project and I need to subtract two date time values to get the number of days. A sample of the data can be seen below:


                   ALARM_DATE               CONT_DATE  \
0      2020/06/18 00:00:00+00  2020/06/23 00:00:00+00   
1      2020/06/01 00:00:00+00  2020/06/04 00:00:00+00   
2      2020/08/10 00:00:00+00  2020/03/01 00:00:00+00   
3      2020/03/31 00:00:00+00  2020/04/01 00:00:00+00   
4      2020/04/14 00:00:00+00  2020/04/19 00:00:00+00   
...                       ...                     ...

I tried simply subtracting the values, but obviously that didn’t work. Can anyone please help?

Aarian
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  • Use `pd.to_datetime` first. –  Mar 23 '22 at 20:37
  • Does this answer your question? [Add column with number of days between dates in DataFrame pandas](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22132525/add-column-with-number-of-days-between-dates-in-dataframe-pandas) – Hamzah Mar 23 '22 at 22:27

1 Answers1

2

Convert your columns to actual dates first:

df['ALARM_DATE'] = pd.to_datetime(df['ALARM_DATE'])
df['CONT_DATE'] = pd.to_datetime(df['CONT_DATE'])

Or:

df[['ALARM_DATE', 'CONT_DATE']] = df[['ALARM_DATE', 'CONT_DATE']].apply(pd.to_datetime)

Output:

>>> df['CONT_DATE'] - df['ALARM_DATE']
0      5 days
1      3 days
2   -162 days
3      1 days
4      5 days
dtype: timedelta64[ns]