polars.Series.str.to_datetime#

Series.str.to_datetime(
format: str | None = None,
*,
time_unit: TimeUnit | None = None,
time_zone: str | None = None,
strict: bool = True,
exact: bool = True,
cache: bool = True,
utc: bool | None = None,
use_earliest: bool | None = None,
ambiguous: Ambiguous | Series = 'raise',
) → Series[source]#

Convert a String column into a Datetime column.

Parameters:
format

Format to use for conversion. Refer to the chrono crate documentation for the full specification. Example: "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S". If set to None (default), the format is inferred from the data.

time_unit{None, ‘us’, ‘ns’, ‘ms’}

Unit of time for the resulting Datetime column. If set to None (default), the time unit is inferred from the format string if given, eg: "%F %T%.3f" => Datetime("ms"). If no fractional second component is found, the default is "us".

time_zone

Time zone for the resulting Datetime column.

strict

Raise an error if any conversion fails.

exact

Require an exact format match. If False, allow the format to match anywhere in the target string.

Note

Using exact=False introduces a performance penalty - cleaning your data beforehand will almost certainly be more performant.

cache

Use a cache of unique, converted datetimes to apply the conversion.

utc

Parse time zone aware datetimes as UTC. This may be useful if you have data with mixed offsets.

Deprecated since version 0.18.0: This is now a no-op, you can safely remove it. Offset-naive strings are parsed as pl.Datetime(time_unit), and offset-aware strings are converted to pl.Datetime(time_unit, "UTC").

use_earliest

Determine how to deal with ambiguous datetimes:

  • None (default): raise

  • True: use the earliest datetime

  • False: use the latest datetime

Deprecated since version 0.19.0: Use ambiguous instead

ambiguous

Determine how to deal with ambiguous datetimes:

  • 'raise' (default): raise

  • 'earliest': use the earliest datetime

  • 'latest': use the latest datetime

  • 'null': set to null

Examples

>>> s = pl.Series(["2020-01-01 01:00Z", "2020-01-01 02:00Z"])
>>> s.str.to_datetime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M%#z")
shape: (2,)
Series: '' [datetime[μs, UTC]]
[
        2020-01-01 01:00:00 UTC
        2020-01-01 02:00:00 UTC
]