Pandas - automatically detect date columns **at run time**

Question

I was wondering if pandas is capable of automatically detecting which columns are datetime objects and read those columns in as dates instead of strings?

I am looki

Answer 1

You can avoid a for loop and use the parameter errors='ignore' to avoid modifying unwanted values. In the code below we apply a to_datetime transformation (ignoring errors) on all object columns (other columns are returned as is).

If ‘ignore’, then invalid parsing will return the input

df = df.apply(lambda col: pd.to_datetime(col, errors='ignore') 
              if col.dtypes == object 
              else col, 
              axis=0)

df.dtypes

# 0            object
# 1    datetime64[ns]
# 2             int64