Convert Excel style date with pandas

Question

I have to parse an xml file which gives me datetimes in Excel style; for example: 42580.3333333333.

Does Pandas provide a way to convert that number int

Answer 1

You can use the 3rd party xlrd library before passing to pd.to_datetime:

import xlrd

def read_date(date):
    return xlrd.xldate.xldate_as_datetime(date, 0)

df = pd.DataFrame({'date':[42580.3333333333, 10023]})

df['new'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'].apply(read_date), errors='coerce')

print(df)

           date                 new
0  42580.333333 2016-07-29 08:00:00
1  10023.000000 1927-06-10 00:00:00