Add column with number of days between dates in DataFrame pandas

Question

I want to subtract dates in 'A' from dates in 'B' and add a new column with the difference.

df
          A        B
one 2014-01-01  2014-02-28 
two 2014-02-03  2014-03-01

I've tried the following, but get an error when I try to include this in a for loop...

import datetime
date1=df['A'][0]
date2=df['B'][0]
mdate1 = datetime.datetime.strptime(date1, "%Y-%m-%d").date()
rdate1 = datetime.datetime.strptime(date2, "%Y-%m-%d").date()
delta =  (mdate1 - rdate1).days
print delta

What should I do?

Answer 1

To remove the 'days' text element, you can also make use of the dt() accessor for series: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.Series.dt.html

So,

df[['A','B']] = df[['A','B']].apply(pd.to_datetime) #if conversion required
df['C'] = (df['B'] - df['A']).dt.days

which returns:

             A          B   C
one 2014-01-01 2014-02-28  58
two 2014-02-03 2014-03-01  26