How do I convert the DataFrame's Date object to a datetime format for plotting?

Question

I am using a data set from Yahoo Finance, about stock market data. I wanted to plot the close price of the stock vs. the date range. On the X-Axis I wanted the date values and on the Y-axis I wanted the close price.

This is the data frame I have:

	Date	Close	Adj Close
0	03/04/2006	19.267448	9.831543
1	04/04/2006	19.413416	9.906025
2	05/04/2006	20.218927	10.317053
3	07/04/2006	19.899965	10.154296
4	10/04/2006	19.564787	9.983268

The data types used are:

• Date: object
• Close: float64
• Adj Close: float64
• dtype: object

I plot I got was: The plot of the close price, where X-Axis has numbers from 0 - 3500

dataframe name:df column name: Close

I tried the following code:

df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'], format='%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f')and got: ValueError: time data '03/04/2006' does not match format '%d%b%Y:%H:%M:%S.%f' (match)

I also tried:

df['Date'] = df['Date'].apply(pd.to_datetime) and got a ParserError: Unknown string format: 03/04/200604/04/2006

Answer 1

Use:

pd.to_datetime(df['date'])

without format parameter. Example:

df = pd.DataFrame({'date':['03/04/2006', '05/04/2006']})
pd.to_datetime(df['date'])

output: