Convert pandas datetime month to string representation

Question

I want to have a pandas DataFrame with a timestamp column and want to create a column with just the month. I want to have the month column with string representations of the month, not with integers. I have done something like this:

df['Dates'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Dates'])
df['Month'] = df.Dates.dt.month
df['Month'] = df.Month.apply(lambda x: datetime.strptime(str(x), '%m').strftime('%b'))

However, this is some kind of a brute force approach and not very performant. Is there a more elegant way to convert the integer representation of the month into a string representation?

Answer 1

use vectorised dt.strftime on your datetimes:

In [43]:
df = pd.DataFrame({'dates':pd.date_range(dt.datetime(2016,1,1), dt.datetime(2017,2,1), freq='M')})
df

Out[43]:
        dates
0  2016-01-31
1  2016-02-29
2  2016-03-31
3  2016-04-30
4  2016-05-31
5  2016-06-30
6  2016-07-31
7  2016-08-31
8  2016-09-30
9  2016-10-31
10 2016-11-30
11 2016-12-31
12 2017-01-31

In [44]:    
df['month'] = df['dates'].dt.strftime('%b')
df

Out[44]:
        dates month
0  2016-01-31   Jan
1  2016-02-29   Feb
2  2016-03-31   Mar
3  2016-04-30   Apr
4  2016-05-31   May
5  2016-06-30   Jun
6  2016-07-31   Jul
7  2016-08-31   Aug
8  2016-09-30   Sep
9  2016-10-31   Oct
10 2016-11-30   Nov
11 2016-12-31   Dec
12 2017-01-31   Jan