How can I work with different date formats in the same column at the same time?

Q&A
#1

This is question is related to screen 5 of “Working with Dates and Times in Python”.
I am trying to work on the original dataset for White House Visitor Archive - 2015 rather than the one that the mission is using. I have extracted the data and pulled out the columns similar to the data set in the mission. Below is the link to the dataset. I am using the 2015 dataset.

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/disclosures/visitor-records

While converting the appt_start_date column, I was getting error and traced that some of the columns were not having time stamp and there are multiple time formats in the same column. Below is the code that I originally used

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Traceback Error:

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Is there a way to resolve this and update multiple date-time formats in the same column?

Also, I wrote the below code and it worked fine for now since there were just two different formats. Is there a better way to do perform this task? Any help would be appreciated?

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Thanks in advance!

#2

Hello @itika.sharma10, Welcome to the DataQuest Community!!

In your first code you code a ValueError since the format that you provided did not match the date format. As you can see:

ValueError: time data '10/19/2014' does not match format '%m/%d/%Y %H:%M'

The date format is in '%m/%d/%Y' thats why your second code works.

#3

@info.victoromondi - yes, I got that part but that was after I came across the error method. Is there any better way to work with multiple date formats at one go.

#4

yes, it depends on how the date is formatted. Alwys check the format first.