Pandas how to convert time in string to integer?

April 27, 2022

I have pandas Series (column) of time in string. I am interested in time but I need it in to convert to integer or float.

here is my dataframe:

 df = pd.DataFrame({'time': ['00:04:01.2540000', '00:02:17.6700000', '00:03:31.6830000',
       '00:03:28.5670000', '00:01:50.6770000', '00:02:26.0170000',...], ...}

In the time column is in string. If I convert to by pd.to_datetime() it makes me date(it’s ok) by if I tried to convert to number I got time in Unix something like 1651050829.
And I wasn’t able to figured out how to get just the time.

I am interested just in time in seconds. For example the first is 4 minutes and 1 seconds so desired results is 241 seconds.

>Solution :

Use pd.to_timedelta(df['time']).dt.total_seconds().

Demo:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame({'time': ['00:04:01.2540000', '00:02:17.6700000']})
>>> df 
               time
0  00:04:01.2540000
1  00:02:17.6700000
>>> pd.to_timedelta(df['time']).dt.total_seconds() 
0    241.254
1    137.670
Name: time, dtype: float64

edit: chain an .astype(int) if you want to truncate the decimal places.