Suppose, you have a column named ‘date’ in pandas data frame df. It represents a date and/or time, but pandas thinks it just a string (or an object) and you can’t apply all date/time-specific operations on it. The solution is simple:
df['date'] = pandas.to_datetime(df['date'])though the to_datetime function is smart enough to recognize date/time format, you can add your own format specification:
df['date'] = pandas.to_datetime(df['date'], format='%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f')