How to rename datetime column name to string format in python?-CodePudding

I have a dataset that has column names in datetime format:

And I would like to change their names to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 > Jan-14 and so on.

operations.columns = pd.to_datetime(operations.columns).to_period('M')

The above code gave me the following error:

ParserError: Unknown string format: Aircraft Name How should I approach this problem?

CodePudding user response：

here is one way to change it. Check if the column type is datetime, then reformat it otherwise, keep it as is

import datetime

operations.columns = [col.strftime('%M %d') 
               if (isinstance(col, datetime.date)  )
               else col
               for col in operations.columns]

CodePudding user response：

you can parse the column names to datetime (and format to the desired format), then use only those elements where the conversion succeeds (else use the old elements). EX:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1, 1, 1], 'b': [2, 2, 2], '2021-02-22 00:00:00': [3, 3, 3]})

newnames = pd.to_datetime(df.columns, errors='coerce').strftime("%b-%d")

df.columns = newnames.where(~newnames.isnull(), df.columns)

df
   a  b  Feb-22
0  1  2       3
1  1  2       3
2  1  2       3