Find closest row of DataFrame to given time in Pandas

Question

I have a Pandas dataframe which is indexed by a DatetimeIndex:

DatetimeIndex: 53732 entries, 1993-01-07 12:23:5         


        

Answer 1

This simple method will return the (integer index of the) TimeSeriesIndex entry closest to a given datetime object. There's no need to copy the index to a regular column - simply use the .to_pydatetime method instead.

import numpy as np

i = np.argmin(np.abs(df.index.to_pydatetime() - image_time))

Then you simply use the DataFrame's .iloc indexer:

df.iloc[i]

Here's a function to do this:

def fcl(df, dtObj):
    return df.iloc[np.argmin(np.abs(df.index.to_pydatetime() - dtObj))]

You can then further filter seamlessly, e.g.

fcl(df, dtObj)['column']