Parsing DD MM YY HH MM SS columns from TXT file using Python's pandas

Question

Thank you all for your time in advance. I have a number of space delimited text files in the format;

    29 04 13 18 15 00    7.667
    29 04 13 18 30 00            


        

Answer 1

I think it's going to be easier just to parse the dates them when reading the csv:

In [1]: df = pd.read_csv('0132_3.TXT', header=None, sep='\s+\s', parse_dates=[[0]])

In [2]: df
Out[2]:
                    0      1
0 2013-04-29 00:00:00  7.667
1 2013-04-29 00:00:00  7.000
2 2013-04-29 00:00:00  7.000
3 2013-04-29 00:00:00  7.333
4 2013-04-29 00:00:00  7.000

Since you're using a unusual date format you need to specify a date parser too:

In [11]: def date_parser(ss):
             day, month, year, hour, min, sec = ss.split()
             return pd.Timestamp('20%s-%s-%s %s:%s:%s' % (year, month, day, hour, min, sec))

In [12]: df = pd.read_csv('0132_3.TXT', header=None, sep='\s+\s', parse_dates=[[0]], date_parser=date_parser)

In [13]: df
Out[13]:
                    0      1
0 2013-04-29 18:15:00  7.667
1 2013-04-29 18:30:00  7.000
2 2013-04-29 18:45:00  7.000
3 2013-04-29 19:00:00  7.333
4 2013-04-29 19:15:00  7.000