Python – Filtering Pandas DataFrames on dates

dataframedatetimefilteringpandaspython

I have a Pandas DataFrame with a 'date' column. Now I need to filter out all rows in the DataFrame that have dates outside of the next two months. Essentially, I only need to retain the rows that are within the next two months.

What is the best way to achieve this?

Best Answer

If date column is the index, then use .loc for label based indexing or .iloc for positional indexing.

For example:

df.loc['2014-01-01':'2014-02-01']

See details here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/dsintro.html#indexing-selection

If the column is not the index you have two choices:

  1. Make it the index (either temporarily or permanently if it's time-series data)
  2. df[(df['date'] > '2013-01-01') & (df['date'] < '2013-02-01')]

See here for the general explanation

Note: .ix is deprecated.