Combine Date and Time columns using python pandas

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It’s worth mentioning that you may have been able to read this in directly e.g. if you were using read_csv using parse_dates=[['Date', 'Time']].

Assuming these are just strings you could simply add them together (with a space), allowing you to use to_datetime, which works without specifying the format= parameter

In [11]: df['Date'] + ' ' + df['Time']
Out[11]:
0    01-06-2013 23:00:00
1    02-06-2013 01:00:00
2    02-06-2013 21:00:00
3    02-06-2013 22:00:00
4    02-06-2013 23:00:00
5    03-06-2013 01:00:00
6    03-06-2013 21:00:00
7    03-06-2013 22:00:00
8    03-06-2013 23:00:00
9    04-06-2013 01:00:00
dtype: object

In [12]: pd.to_datetime(df['Date'] + ' ' + df['Time'])
Out[12]:
0   2013-01-06 23:00:00
1   2013-02-06 01:00:00
2   2013-02-06 21:00:00
3   2013-02-06 22:00:00
4   2013-02-06 23:00:00
5   2013-03-06 01:00:00
6   2013-03-06 21:00:00
7   2013-03-06 22:00:00
8   2013-03-06 23:00:00
9   2013-04-06 01:00:00
dtype: datetime64[ns]

Alternatively, without the + ' ', but the format= parameter must be used. Additionally, pandas is good at inferring the format to be converted to a datetime, however, specifying the exact format is faster.

pd.to_datetime(df['Date'] + df['Time'], format="%m-%d-%Y%H:%M:%S")

Note: surprisingly (for me), this works fine with NaNs being converted to NaT, but it is worth worrying that the conversion (perhaps using the raise argument).

%%timeit

# sample dataframe with 10000000 rows using df from the OP
df = pd.concat([df for _ in range(1000000)]).reset_index(drop=True)

%%timeit
pd.to_datetime(df['Date'] + ' ' + df['Time'])
[result]:
1.73 s ± 10.4 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

%%timeit
pd.to_datetime(df['Date'] + df['Time'], format="%m-%d-%Y%H:%M:%S")
[result]:
1.33 s ± 9.88 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1 loop each)

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