String to date in pandas
Upon further investigation, I found out that the error only happens on the first element of the series. It seems that the string has '\ufeff' added to it. So I just did a series.str.replace() and now it is working. Sorry for the bother. Question is how did that BOM end up there?
I have a dataset with dates encoded as strings formatted as %B %d, %Y, eg September 10, 2021.
Using:df['sale_date'] = pd.to_datetime(df.sale_date, format = '%B %d, %Y')
produces this error ValueError: time data 'September 10, 2021' does not match format '%B %d, %Y' (match)
Manually checking with strptimedatetime.strptime('September 10, 2021', '%B %d, %Y') produces the correct datetime object.
Is there something I missed in the pd.to_datetime?
Thanks.