Dataframe – Converting entire column from str object to datetime object – TypeError: strptime() argument 1 must be str, not Series

I want to convert values in entire column from strings to datetime objects, but I can’t accomplish it with this code which works on solo strings i.e. (if I add .iloc[] and specify the index):

price_df_higher_interval['DateTime'] = datetime.datetime.strptime(price_df_higher_interval['DateTime'],
                                                                     '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')

Also I would like to ommit looping through the dataframe, but I don’t know if that won’t be necessery.

Thank you for your help 🙂

>Solution :

You could use the pd.to_datetime function.

df = pd.DataFrame({"str_date": ["2023-01-01 12:13:21", "2023-01-02 13:10:24 "]})
df["date"] = pd.to_datetime(df["str_date"], format="%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S")

df.dtypes
str_date            object
date        datetime64[ns]
dtype: object