Today I was positively surprised by the fact that while reading data from a data file (for example) pandas is able to recognize types of values:
df = pandas.read_csv('test.dat', delimiter=r"\s+", names=['col1','col2','col3'])
For example it can be checked in this way:
for i, r in df.iterrows():
print type(r['col1']), type(r['col2']), type(r['col3'])
In particular integer, floats and strings were recognized correctly. However, I have a column that has dates in the following format: 2013-6-4. These dates were recognized as strings (not as python date-objects). Is there a way to “learn” pandas to recognized dates?
