How can I convert these dates to the correct format in a Pandas Dataframe?

I have a dataframe with some dates and I want to convert them to datetime format. So I used the pd.to_datetime function to do so. However, it only works for some of the dates as the others are not written in the correct order. Example:

df = pd.DataFrame({'dates' : ['December 2021 17', '2005 July 01', 'December 2000 01', '2008 May 11', 
                              'October 2000 04', 'September 2016 04', 'May 1998 09']})

Using pd.to_datetime will only return values for the yy-mm-dd order. I tried splitting these into list and trying to reorder them, but that didn’t seem to work for me.

>Solution :

You can use apply and give it to_datetime:

df.dates = df.dates.apply(pd.to_datetime)

This is the output of df now:

       dates
0 2021-12-17
1 2005-07-01
2 2000-12-01
3 2008-05-11
4 2000-10-04
5 2016-09-04
6 1998-05-09