In Pandas, how to convert a string to a datetime object with milliseconds?

Question

I have a column of event's timestamp in my dataframe, looks like "2016-06-10 18:58:25:675", the last 3 digits are milliseconds, is there a efficient way to transform this column to a Pandas datatime type?

When I try:

pd.to_datetime('2016-06-10 18:57:35:317')

An error occurs saying "Unknown string format".

Solution 1

Something like this should work

pd.to_datetime('2016-06-10 18:57:35:317', format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S:%f")

You can look up datetime formats here

Solution 2

Normally there is a period / full-stop between the seconds and microseconds.

Since your data does not have that you can specify how your data is formatted:

pd.to_datetime('2016-06-10 18:57:35:317', format='%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S:%f')

Comments

[mechanical_meat]

Awesome! We answered at the same time! Well played, Sir

[mgilbert]

Millisecond resolution ;)

[Andreas Gebhard]

This should be an example in the docs!