python - Removing the timestamp from a datetime in pandas dataframe

Question

Scenario: I have a dataframe with multiple columns retrieved from excel worksheets. Some of these columns are dates: some have just the date (yyyy:mm:dd) and some have date and timestamp (yyyy:mm:dd 00.00.000000).

Question: How can I remove the time stamp from the dates when they are not the index of my dataframe?

What I already tried: From other posts here in SO (working with dates in pandas - remove unseen characters in datetime and convert to string and How to strip a pandas datetime of date, hours and seconds) I found:

pd.DatetimeIndex(dfST['timestamp']).date

and

strfitme (df['timestamp'].apply(lambda x: x.strftime('%Y-%m-%d'))

But I can't seem to find a way to use those directly to the wanted column when it is not the index of my dataframe.

Answer 1

You can do the following:

dfST['timestamp'] = pd.to_datetime(dfST['timestamp'])

to_datetime() will infer the formatting of the date column. You can also pass errors='coerce' if the column contains non-date values.

After completing the above, you'll be able to create a new column containing only date values:

dfST['new_date_column'] = dfST['timestamp'].dt.date