python - Filtering Pandas DataFrames on dates

Question

I have a Pandas DataFrame with a 'date' column. Now I need to filter out all rows in the DataFrame that have dates outside of the next two months. Essentially, I only need to retain the rows that are within the next two months.

What is the best way to achieve this?

Answer 1

If date column is the index, then use .loc for label based indexing or .iloc for positional indexing.

For example:

df.loc['2014-01-01':'2014-02-01']

See details here http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/dsintro.html#indexing-selection

If the column is not the index you have two choices:

1. Make it the index (either temporarily or permanently if it's time-series data)
2. df[(df['date'] > '2013-01-01') & (df['date'] < '2013-02-01')]

See here for the general explanation

Note: .ix is deprecated.