Extract Month, Year and Day from a Date

June 01, 2019

Date strings aren’t very useful in their raw form, but extracting numeric features such as a date’s Month, Year, and Day can help to represent seasonality in your data. This post shows how extract Month and Year from a date string.

Imports

import pandas as pd

Create Some Example Data

data = {'date': ['2016-01-01', '2018-03-02', '2017-04-16', '2018-01-04', '2016-02-11', '2018-02-12']}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

First, make sure the date column is of type datetime. See here for more detail on this. Then, extract Month, Year, and Day by calling dt.month, dt.year, and dt.day on the datetime column.

df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'])
df['year'] = df['date'].dt.year
df['month'] = df['date'].dt.month
df['day'] = df['date'].dt.day
print(df)

And that’s it! Easy enough.