Working with date and time objects

Python supports date and time handling in the date time and time modules from the standard library:

>>> import datetime
>>> datetime.datetime(2000, 1, 1)
datetime.datetime(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0)

Sometimes, dates are given or expected as strings, so a conversion from or to strings is necessary, which is realized by two functions: strptime and strftime, respectively:

>>> datetime.datetime.strptime("2000/1/1", "%Y/%m/%d")
datetime.datetime(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0)
>>> datetime.datetime(2000, 1, 1, 0, 0).strftime("%Y%m%d")
'20000101'

Real-world data usually comes in all kinds of shapes and it would be great if we did not need to remember the exact date format specifies for parsing. Thankfully, Pandas abstracts away a lot of the friction, when dealing with strings representing dates or time. One of these helper functions is to_datetime:

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> import numpy as np
>>> pd.to_datetime("4th of...