Is there a way to covert date (with different format) into a standardized format in python?

user_13046093 0
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I have a column calls "date" which is an object and it has very different date format like dd.m.yy, dd.mm.yyyy, dd/mm/yyyy, dd/mm, m/d/yyyy etc as below. Obviously by simply using df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date']) will not work. I wonder for messy date value like that, is there anyway to standardized and covert the date into one single format ?

date
17.2.22 # means Feb 17 2022
23.02.22 # means Feb 23 2022
17/02/2022 # means Feb 17 2022
18.2.22 # means Feb 18 2022
2/22/2022 # means Feb 22 2022
3/1/2022 # means March 1 2022
<more messy different format>
python-re pandas date python
2 Answers

Coerce the dates to datetime and allow invalid entries to be turned into nulls.Also, allow pandas to infer the format. code below

df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'], errors='coerce',infer_datetime_format=True)


    date
0 2022-02-17
1 2022-02-23
2 2022-02-17
3 2022-02-18
4 2022-02-22
5 2022-03-01
user_89869750

Based on wwnde's solution, the following works in my real dataset -

df['date'].fillna('',inplace=True)
df['date'] = df['date'].astype('str')
df['date new'] = df['date'].str.replace('.','/')
df['date new'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date new'],
errors='coerce',infer_datetime_format=True)
user_130460930
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