How do I tell if a column in a pandas dataframe is of type datetime? How do I tell if a column is numerical?

Question

I am trying to filter the columns in a pandas dataframe based on whether they are of type date or not. I can figure out which ones are, but then would have to parse that ou

Answer 1

I just encountered this issue and found that @charlie-haley's answer isn't quite general enough for my use case. In particular np.datetime64 doesn't seem to match datetime64[ns, UTC].

df['date_col'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date_str'], utc=True)
print(df.date_str.dtype)  # datetime64[ns, UTC]

You could also extend the list of dtypes to include other types, but that doesn't seem like a good solution for future compatability, so I ended up using the is_datetime64_any_dtype function from the pandas api instead.

In:

from pandas.api.types import is_datetime64_any_dtype as is_datetime

df[[column for column in df.columns if is_datetime(df[column])]]

Out:

                   date_col
0 2017-02-01 00:00:00+00:00
1 2017-03-01 00:00:00+00:00
2 2017-04-01 00:00:00+00:00
3 2017-05-01 00:00:00+00:00