How to Sort a Pandas DataFrame by Date
Introduction
Pandas is an extremely popular data manipulation and analysis library. It’s the go-to tool for loading in and analyzing datasets for many.
Correctly sorting data is a crucial element of many tasks regarding data analysis. In this tutorial, we’ll take a look at how to sort a Pandas DataFrame by date.
Let’s start off with making a simple DataFrame with a few dates:
import pandas as pd
data = {'Name':["John", "Paul", "Dhilan", "Bob", "Henry"],
'Date of Birth': ["01/06/86", "05/10/77", "11/12/88", "25/12/82", "01/06/86"]}
df = pd.DataFrame(data)
print(df)
By default our output is sorted by the DataFrames index:
Name Date of Birth
0 John 01/06/86
1 Paul 05/10/77
2 Dhilan 11/12/88
3 Bob 25/12/82
4 Henry 01/06/86
The eagle-eyed may notice that John and Paul have the same date of birth – this is on-purpose as we’ll see in a moment.
Convert Strings