How can I customize date and plot them ordered in python's matplotlib?

Question

I have a dataset with a column for Date that looks like this:

| Date     | Another column |
| -------- | -------------- |
| 1.2019   | row1           |
| 2.2019   | row2           |
| 11.2018  | row3           |
| 8.2021   | row4           |
| 6.2021   | row5           |

The Date column is interpreted as a float dtype but in reality 1.2019 means month 1 - that is, january - of the year 2019. I changed it to string type and it worked well, at least it seems so. But I want to plot this data against the total count of something, which is the column 2 of the dataset, but when I plot it:

the x-axis is not ordered. Well, why would it be? There is no ordered relationship between the string 1.2019 and 2.2019: there is no way to know the first is january of 2019 and the second one is february. I thought of using regex, or even mapping 1.2019 to jan-2019 but the problem persists: strings with no date ordered relationship. I know there is the datetime method but I don't know if this would help me.

How can I proceed? it is probably very easy, but I am stucked here!

Answer 1

Convert to datetime with pandas.to_datetime:

df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'].astype(str), format='%m.%Y')

or if you have a pandas version that refuses to convert if the day is missing:

pd.to_datetime('1.'+df['Date'].astype(str), format='%d.%m.%Y')

output:

        Date Another column
0 2019-01-01           row1
1 2019-02-01           row2
2 2018-11-01           row3
3 2021-08-01           row4
4 2021-06-01           row5