Extracting the first day of month of a datetime type column in pandas

Question

I have the following dataframe:

user_id    purchase_date 
  1        2015-01-23 14:05:21
  2        2015-02-05 05:07:30
  3        2015-02-18 17:08:51
  4            


        

Answer 1

Try this ..

df['month']=pd.to_datetime(df.purchase_date.astype(str).str[0:7]+'-01')

Out[187]: 
   user_id        purchase_date       month
0        1  2015-01-23 14:05:21  2015-01-01
1        2  2015-02-05 05:07:30  2015-02-01
2        3  2015-02-18 17:08:51  2015-02-01
3        4  2015-03-21 17:07:30  2015-03-01
4        5  2015-03-11 18:32:56  2015-03-01
5        6  2015-03-03 11:02:30  2015-03-01