Converting PeriodIndex to DateTimeIndex?

Question

I have a question regarding converting a tseries.period.PeriodIndex into a datetime.

I have a DataFrame which looks like this:

               colors      c         


        

Answer 1

You can use the to_timestamp method of PeriodIndex for this:

In [25]: pidx = pd.period_range('2012-01-01', periods=10)

In [26]: pidx
Out[26]:
<class 'pandas.tseries.period.PeriodIndex'>
[2012-01-01, ..., 2012-01-10]
Length: 10, Freq: D

In [27]: pidx.to_timestamp()
Out[27]:
<class 'pandas.tseries.index.DatetimeIndex'>
[2012-01-01, ..., 2012-01-10]
Length: 10, Freq: D, Timezone: None

In older versions of Pandas the method was to_datetime

Answer 2

You can also use the following to get exactly the same result.

idx.astype('datetime64[ns]') 

To convert back to period, you can do:

 idx.to_period(freq='D')