I have a pandas dataframe as follows:

Symbol  Date
A       02/20/2015
A       01/15/2016
A       08/21/2015

I want to sort it by Date, but the column is just an object.

I tried to make the column a date object, but I ran into an issue where that format is not the format needed. The format needed is 2015-02-20, etc.

So now I’m trying to figure out how to have numpy convert the ‘American’ dates into the ISO standard, so that I can make them date objects, so that I can sort by them.

How would I convert these american dates into ISO standard, or is there a more straight forward method I’m missing within pandas?

You can use pd.to_datetime() to convert to a datetime object. It takes a format parameter, but in your case I don’t think you need it.

>>> import pandas as pd
>>> df = pd.DataFrame( {'Symbol':['A','A','A'] ,
    'Date':['02/20/2015','01/15/2016','08/21/2015']})
>>> df
         Date Symbol
0  02/20/2015      A
1  01/15/2016      A
2  08/21/2015      A
>>> df['Date'] =pd.to_datetime(df.Date)
>>> df.sort('Date') # This now sorts in date order
        Date Symbol
0 2015-02-20      A
2 2015-08-21      A
1 2016-01-15      A

For future search, you can change the sort statement:

>>> df.sort_values(by='Date') # This now sorts in date order
        Date Symbol
0 2015-02-20      A
2 2015-08-21      A
1 2016-01-15      A

sort method has been deprecated and replaced with sort_values. After converting to datetime object using df['Date']=pd.to_datetime(df['Date'])

df.sort_values(by=['Date'])

Note: to sort in-place and/or in a descending order (the most recent first):

df.sort_values(by=['Date'], inplace=True, ascending=False)

@JAB’s answer is fast and concise. But it changes the DataFrame you are trying to sort, which you may or may not want.

_{(Note: You almost certainly will want it, because your date columns should be dates, not strings!)}

In the unlikely event that you don’t want to change the dates into dates, you can also do it a different way.

First, get the index from your sorted Date column:

In [25]: pd.to_datetime(df.Date).order().index
Out[25]: Int64Index([0, 2, 1], dtype='int64')

Then use it to index your original DataFrame, leaving it untouched:

In [26]: df.ix[pd.to_datetime(df.Date).order().index]
Out[26]: 
        Date Symbol
0 2015-02-20      A
2 2015-08-21      A
1 2016-01-15      A

Magic!

Note: for Pandas versions 0.20.0 and later, use loc instead of ix, which is now deprecated.

The data containing the date column can be read by using the below code:

data = pd.csv(file_path,parse_dates=[date_column])

Once the data is read by using the above line of code, the column containing the information about the date can be accessed using pd.date_time() like:

pd.date_time(data[date_column], format = '%d/%m/%y')

to change the format of date as per the requirement.

The documentation for Pandas has numerous examples of best practices for working with data stored in various formats.

However, I am unable to find any good examples for working with databases like MySQL for example.

Can anyone point me to links or give some code snippets of how to convert query results using mysql-python to data frames in Pandas efficiently ?

As Wes says, io/sql’s read_sql will do it, once you’ve gotten a database connection using a DBI compatible library. We can look at two short examples using the MySQLdb and cx_Oracle libraries to connect to Oracle and MySQL and query their data dictionaries. Here is the example for cx_Oracle:

import pandas as pd
import cx_Oracle

ora_conn = cx_Oracle.connect('your_connection_string')
df_ora = pd.read_sql('select * from user_objects', con=ora_conn)    
print 'loaded dataframe from Oracle. # Records: ', len(df_ora)
ora_conn.close()

And here is the equivalent example for MySQLdb:

import MySQLdb
mysql_cn= MySQLdb.connect(host='myhost', 
                port=3306,user='myusername', passwd='mypassword', 
                db='information_schema')
df_mysql = pd.read_sql('select * from VIEWS;', con=mysql_cn)    
print 'loaded dataframe from MySQL. records:', len(df_mysql)
mysql_cn.close()

For recent readers of this question: pandas have the following warning in their docs for version 14.0:

Warning: Some of the existing functions or function aliases have been deprecated and will be removed in future versions. This includes: tquery, uquery, read_frame, frame_query, write_frame.

And:

Warning: The support for the ‘mysql’ flavor when using DBAPI connection objects has been deprecated. MySQL will be further supported with SQLAlchemy engines (GH6900).

This makes many of the answers here outdated. You should use sqlalchemy:

from sqlalchemy import create_engine
import pandas as pd
engine = create_engine('dialect://user:pass@host:port/schema', echo=False)
f = pd.read_sql_query('SELECT * FROM mytable', engine, index_col = 'ID')

For the record, here is an example using a sqlite database:

import pandas as pd
import sqlite3

with sqlite3.connect("whatever.sqlite") as con:
    sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name"
    df = pd.read_sql_query(sql, con)
    print df.shape

I prefer to create queries with SQLAlchemy, and then make a DataFrame from it. SQLAlchemy makes it easier to combine SQL conditions Pythonically if you intend to mix and match things over and over.

from sqlalchemy.ext.declarative import declarative_base
from sqlalchemy import Table
from sqlalchemy import create_engine
from sqlalchemy.orm import sessionmaker
from pandas import DataFrame
import datetime

# We are connecting to an existing service
engine = create_engine('dialect://user:pwd@host:port/db', echo=False)
Session = sessionmaker(bind=engine)
session = Session()
Base = declarative_base()

# And we want to query an existing table
tablename = Table('tablename', 
    Base.metadata, 
    autoload=True, 
    autoload_with=engine, 
    schema='ownername')

# These are the "Where" parameters, but I could as easily 
# create joins and limit results
us = tablename.c.country_code.in_(['US','MX'])
dc = tablename.c.locn_name.like('%DC%')
dt = tablename.c.arr_date >= datetime.date.today() # Give me convenience or...

q = session.query(tablename).\
            filter(us & dc & dt) # That's where the magic happens!!!

def querydb(query):
    """
    Function to execute query and return DataFrame.
    """
    df = DataFrame(query.all());
    df.columns = [x['name'] for x in query.column_descriptions]
    return df

querydb(q)

MySQL example:

import MySQLdb as db
from pandas import DataFrame
from pandas.io.sql import frame_query

database = db.connect('localhost','username','password','database')
data     = frame_query("SELECT * FROM data", database)

The same syntax works for Ms SQL server using podbc also.

import pyodbc
import pandas.io.sql as psql

cnxn = pyodbc.connect('DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER=servername;DATABASE=mydb;UID=username;PWD=password') 
cursor = cnxn.cursor()
sql = ("""select * from mytable""")

df = psql.frame_query(sql, cnxn)
cnxn.close()

And this is how you connect to PostgreSQL using psycopg2 driver (install with “apt-get install python-psycopg2” if you’re on Debian Linux derivative OS).

import pandas.io.sql as psql
import psycopg2

conn = psycopg2.connect("dbname='datawarehouse' user='user1' host='localhost' password='uberdba'")

q = """select month_idx, sum(payment) from bi_some_table"""

df3 = psql.frame_query(q, conn)

For Sybase the following works (with http://python-sybase.sourceforge.net)

import pandas.io.sql as psql
import Sybase

df = psql.frame_query("<Query>", con=Sybase.connect("<dsn>", "<user>", "<pwd>"))

pandas.io.sql.frame_query is deprecated. Use pandas.read_sql instead.

import the module

import pandas as pd
import oursql

connect

conn=oursql.connect(host="localhost",user="me",passwd="mypassword",db="classicmodels")
sql="Select customerName, city,country from customers order by customerName,country,city"
df_mysql = pd.read_sql(sql,conn)
print df_mysql

That works just fine and using pandas.io.sql frame_works (with the deprecation warning). Database used is the sample database from mysql tutorial.

This should work just fine.

import MySQLdb as mdb
import pandas as pd
con = mdb.connect(‘127.0.0.1’, ‘root’, ‘password’, ‘database_name’);
with con:
 cur = con.cursor()
 cur.execute(“select random_number_one, random_number_two, random_number_three from randomness.a_random_table”)
 rows = cur.fetchall()
 df = pd.DataFrame( [[ij for ij in i] for i in rows] )
 df.rename(columns={0: ‘Random Number One’, 1: ‘Random Number Two’, 2: ‘Random Number Three’}, inplace=True);
 print(df.head(20))

This helped for me for connecting to AWS MYSQL(RDS) from python 3.x based lambda function and loading into a pandas DataFrame

import json
import boto3
import pymysql
import pandas as pd
user = 'username'
password = 'XXXXXXX'
client = boto3.client('rds')
def lambda_handler(event, context):
    conn = pymysql.connect(host='xxx.xxxxus-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com', port=3306, user=user, passwd=password, db='database name', connect_timeout=5)
    df= pd.read_sql('select * from TableName limit 10',con=conn)
    print(df)
    # TODO implement
    #return {
    #    'statusCode': 200,
    #    'df': df
    #}

For Postgres users

import psycopg2
import pandas as pd

conn = psycopg2.connect("database='datawarehouse' user='user1' host='localhost' password='uberdba'")

customers = 'select * from customers'

customers_df = pd.read_sql(customers,conn)

customers_df

I would like to import the following csv as strings not as int64. Pandas read_csv automatically converts it to int64, but I need this column as string.

ID
00013007854817840016671868
00013007854817840016749251
00013007854817840016754630
00013007854817840016781876
00013007854817840017028824
00013007854817840017963235
00013007854817840018860166


df = read_csv('sample.csv')

df.ID
>>

0   -9223372036854775808
1   -9223372036854775808
2   -9223372036854775808
3   -9223372036854775808
4   -9223372036854775808
5   -9223372036854775808
6   -9223372036854775808
Name: ID

Unfortunately using converters gives the same result.

df = read_csv('sample.csv', converters={'ID': str})
df.ID
>>

0   -9223372036854775808
1   -9223372036854775808
2   -9223372036854775808
3   -9223372036854775808
4   -9223372036854775808
5   -9223372036854775808
6   -9223372036854775808
Name: ID

Just want to reiterate this will work in pandas >= 0.9.1:

In [2]: read_csv('sample.csv', dtype={'ID': object})
Out[2]: 
                           ID
0  00013007854817840016671868
1  00013007854817840016749251
2  00013007854817840016754630
3  00013007854817840016781876
4  00013007854817840017028824
5  00013007854817840017963235
6  00013007854817840018860166

I’m creating an issue about detecting integer overflows also.

EDIT: See resolution here: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/2247

This probably isn’t the most elegant way to do it, but it gets the job done.

In[1]: import numpy as np

In[2]: import pandas as pd

In[3]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.genfromtxt('/Users/spencerlyon2/Desktop/test.csv', dtype=str)[1:], columns=['ID'])

In[4]: df
Out[4]: 
                       ID
0  00013007854817840016671868
1  00013007854817840016749251
2  00013007854817840016754630
3  00013007854817840016781876
4  00013007854817840017028824
5  00013007854817840017963235
6  00013007854817840018860166

Just replace '/Users/spencerlyon2/Desktop/test.csv' with the path to your file

Since pandas 1.0 it became much more straightforward. This will read column ‘ID’ as dtype ‘string’:

pd.read_csv('sample.csv',dtype={'ID':'string'})

As we can see in this Getting started guide, ‘string’ dtype has been introduced (before strings were treated as dtype ‘object’).