Pandas in Action

11 Working with dates and times

This chapter covers

• Converting Series of strings to datetimes
• Retrieving date and time information from datetime objects
• Rounding dates to week, month, and quarter ends
• Adding and subtracting datetimes to and from each other

A datetime is a data type for storing date and time. It can model a specific date (such as October 4, 2021), a particular time (such as 11:50 a.m.), or both (such as October 4, 2021 at 11:50 a.m.). Datetimes are valuable because they allow us to track trends over time. A financial analyst may use datetimes to determine the weekdays when a stock performs best. A restaurant owner may use them to discover the peak hours that customers are patronizing the business. An operations manager may ...