Parsing String To Datetime While Accounting For Am/pm In Pandas

I am trying to parse a string in this format '2018 - 07 - 07 04 - AM' to pandas datetime using strftime format. However, It seems to me the format doesn't recognize the difference

Solution 1:

Since you're parsing a 12-hour time format, you will need %I instead of %H, otherwise the %p specifier has no effect.

pd.to_datetime("2018 - 07 - 07 04 - PM", format='%Y - %m - %d %I - %p')
Timestamp('2018-07-07 16:00:00')

This behaviour is documented in the docs:

When used with the strptime() function, the %p directive only affects the output hour field if the %I directive is used to parse the hour.

Solution 2:

In my case, I got an error message when trying the proposed solutions:

 ValueError: unconverted data remains: PM

This was solved by setting the locale to en_US.