Month and Date messed up in pandas dataframe - python-3.x

Question

I have a situation where month and date are messed up for few dates in my dataframe. For e.g here is the input:
df['work_date'].head(15)
0 2018-01-01
1 2018-02-01
2 2018-03-01
3 2018-04-01
4 2018-05-01
5 2018-06-01
6 2018-07-01
7 2018-08-01
8 2018-09-01
9 2018-10-01
10 2018-11-01
11 2018-12-01
12 2018-01-13
13 2018-01-14
14 2018-01-15
The date is stored as a string. As you can see, the date is in the format yyyy-dd-mm till 12th of Jan and then becomes yyyy-mm-dd. The dataframe consists of 3 years worth data and this pattern repeats for all months for all years.
My expected output is to standardize the date to format dddd-mm-yy like below.
0 2018-01-01
1 2018-01-02
2 2018-01-03
3 2018-01-04
4 2018-01-05
5 2018-01-06
6 2018-01-07
7 2018-01-08
8 2018-01-09
9 2018-01-10
10 2018-01-11
11 2018-01-12
12 2018-01-13
13 2018-01-14
14 2018-01-15
Below is the code that I wrote and it gets the job done. Basically, I split the date string and do some string manipulations. However, as you can see its not too pretty. I am checking to see if there could be some other elegant solution to this other than doing the df.apply and the loops.
def func(x):
d = x.split('-')
print(d)
if (int(d[1]) <= 12) & (int(d[2]) <= 12) :
d = [d[0],d[2],d[1]]
x = '-'.join(d)
return x
else:
return x
df['work_date'] = df['work_date'].apply(lambda x:func(x))

Answer 1

You could just update the column based on the fact that it is in order and there is only one date and all days of the year are included consecutively:
df['Date'] = pd.date_range(df['work_date'].min(), '2018-01-12', freq='1D')
# you can specify df['work_date'].min() OR df['work_date'].max) OR A STRING. It really depends on what format your minimum and your maximum is
df
Out[1]:
work_date date
0 2018-01-01 2018-01-01
1 2018-02-01 2018-01-02
2 2018-03-01 2018-01-03
3 2018-04-01 2018-01-04
4 2018-05-01 2018-01-05
5 2018-06-01 2018-01-06
6 2018-07-01 2018-01-07
7 2018-08-01 2018-01-08
8 2018-09-01 2018-01-09
9 2018-10-01 2018-01-10
10 2018-11-01 2018-01-11
11 2018-12-01 2018-01-12
12 2018-01-13 2018-01-13
13 2018-01-14 2018-01-14
14 2018-01-15 2018-01-15
To make this more dynamic, you could also do some try / except shown below:
minn = df['work_date'].min()
maxx = df['work_date'].max()
try:
df['Date'] = pd.date_range(minn, maxx, freq='1D')
except ValueError:
s = maxx.split('-')
df['Date'] = pd.date_range(minn, f'{s[0]}-{s[2]}-{s[1]}', freq='1D')
except ValueError:
s = minn.split('-')
df['Date'] = pd.date_range(f'{s[0]}-{s[2]}-{s[1]}', maxx, freq='1D')
df