Efficient way of converting String column to Date in Pandas (in Python), but without Timestamp - string

Question

I am having a DataFrame which contains two String columns df['month'] and df['year']. I want to create a new column df['date'] by combining month and the year column. I have done that successfully using the structure below -
df['date']=pd.to_datetime((df['month']+df['year']),format='%m%Y')
where by for df['month'] = '08' and df['year']='1968'
we get df['date']=1968-08-01
This is exactly what I wanted.
Problem at hand: My DataFrame has more than 200,000 rows and I notice that sometimes, in addition, I also get Timestamp like the one below for a few rows and I want to avoid that -
1972-03-01 00:00:00
I solved this issue by using the .dt acessor, which can be used to manipulate the Series, whereby I explicitly extracted only the date using the code below-
df['date']=pd.to_datetime((df['month']+df['year']),format='%m%Y') #Line 1
df['date']=df['date']=.dt.date #Line 2
The problem was solved, just that the Line 2 took 5 times more time than Line 1.
Question: Is there any way where I could tweak Line 1 into giving just the dates and not the Timestamp? I am sure this simple problem cannot have such an inefficient solution. Can I solve this issue in a more time and resource efficient manner?

Answer 1

AFAIk we don't have date dtype n Pandas, we only have datetime, so we will always have a time part.
Even though Pandas shows: 1968-08-01, it has a time part: 00:00:00.
Demo:
In [32]: df = pd.DataFrame(pd.to_datetime(['1968-08-01', '2017-08-01']), columns=['Date'])
In [33]: df
Out[33]:
Date
0 1968-08-01
1 2017-08-01
In [34]: df['Date'].dt.time
Out[34]:
0 00:00:00
1 00:00:00
Name: Date, dtype: object
And if you want to have a string representation, there is a faster way:
df['date'] = df['year'].astype(str) + '-' + df['month'].astype(str) + '-01'
UPDATE: be aware that .dt.date will give you a string representation:
In [53]: df.dtypes
Out[53]:
Date datetime64[ns]
dtype: object
In [54]: df['new'] = df['Date'].dt.date
In [55]: df
Out[55]:
Date new
0 1968-08-01 1968-08-01
1 2017-08-01 2017-08-01
In [56]: df.dtypes
Out[56]:
Date datetime64[ns]
new object # <--- NOTE !!!
dtype: object