Introduction

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to convert a pandas column to a time delta.

Timedeltas are a relatively new datatype introduced in pandas 0.16.0. They represent a duration, like how many days, hours, minutes, or seconds between two dates or times.

You can convert a column of dates or timestamps to time deltas by using the pd.to_timedelta() function. For example, if you have a column of dates:

# Convert column to timedelta datatype
df['date'] = pd.to_timedelta(df['date'])

What is a time delta?

pandas is a Python package providing fast, flexible, and expressive data structures designed to make working with “relational” or “labeled” data both easy and intuitive. It aims to be the fundamental high-level building block for doing practical, real world data analysis in Python.

Additionally, it has the broader goal of becoming the most powerful and flexible open-source data analysis/manipulation tool available in any language. It is already well on its way towards this goal.

One crucial feature of pandas is its ability to simulate and model time series data. In particular, it offers a suite of tools for dealing with dates, times, and timestamps. This article will focus on how to convert a pandas column to a timedelta.

A time delta is a class that represents a duration of time. It is used to represent the difference between two DateTime objects: DateTime.datetime(2016, 1, 1) – DateTime.datetime(2015, 12, 31). The difference between two datetimes is represented as a timedelta object:

import pandas as pd
from datetime import timedelta

s = pd.Series([pd.Timestamp(‘2016-01-01’), pd.Timestamp(‘2016-01-02’), pd.Timestamp(‘2016-01-03’)])
s – timedelta(days=1)
0 2015-12-31 # Notice that the days have been subtracted from the original dates in the Series
1 2016-01-01
2 2016-01-02
dtype: datetime64[ns]

How to convert a pandas column to timedelta

It is often necessary to convert a pandas column to a timedelta when working with data. The timedelta is a duration of time that is used to represent the difference between two dates or times. To convert a column to a timedelta, you can use the pd.to_timedelta() function.

This function takes an argument that can be either a pandas column or a list of pandas columns and converts them to timedeltas. The syntax for this function is as follows:

pd.to_timedelta(column)

You can also specify the unit of time that you want the timedeltas to be represented in by using the unit argument. For example, if you wanted the timedeltas to be represented in days, you would use the following syntax:

pd.to_timedelta(column, unit=’D’)

Conclusion

From the above analysis, it can be concluded that converting a pandas column to timedelta can be done using the to_timedelta() function. This function can be used to convert an object of type datetime64[ns] or Timestamp to a column of type timedelta64[ns].