Pandas convert dtype object to string

Question

I have a problem converting a dtype column. I am downloading a csv file from yahoo finance.

dt = pd.read_csv('data/Tesla.csv')

this gives me the following information:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 923 entries, 0 to 922
Data columns (total 7 columns):
Date         923 non-null object
Open         923 non-null float64
High         923 non-null float64
Low          923 non-null float64
Close        923 non-null float64
Volume       923 non-null int64
Adj Close    923 non-null float64
dtypes: float64(5), int64(1), object(1)

I am trying to convert Date to a string, but everything I'm trying to do does not work. I tried iterating over a string and converting it with str (). I tried changing the dtype of an object using dt['Date'].apply(str), and I tried a special dtype object and used it:

types={'Date':'str','Open':'float','High':'float','Low':'float','Close':'float','Volume':'int','Adj Close':'float'}
 dt = pd.read_csv('data/Tesla.csv', dtype=types)

But nothing works.

I am using pandas version 0.13.1

Answer 1

Converting dates to DateTime allows you to easily compare user-entered date with dates in your data.

#Load in the data
dt = pd.read_csv('data/Tesla.csv')

#Change the 'Date' column into DateTime
dt['Date']=pd.to_datetime(dt['Date'])

#Find a Date using strings
np.where(dt['Date']=='2014-02-28')
#returns     (array([0]),)

np.where(dt['Date']=='2014-02-21')
#returns (array([5]),)

#To get the entire row information
index = np.where(dt['Date']=='2014-02-21')[0][0]
dt.iloc[index]

#returns:
Date         2014-02-21 00:00:00
Open                      211.64
High                      213.98
Low                       209.19
Close                      209.6
Volume                   7818800
Adj Close                  209.6
Name: 5, dtype: object

, for, , , :

input = np.array(['2014-02-21','2014-02-28'])
for i in input:
    index = np.where(dt['Date']==i)[0][0]
    dt.iloc[index]