ValueError: Data type datetime64[ns] not currently understood. Please report an error to the developers.

[randomgambit]

I do what I am told to do ;-)

I have a big dataframe with the following columns

daily_news.dtypes
Out[11]: 
stock_ric                       object
obs_day                 datetime64[ns]
next_dayfirst           datetime64[ns]
sentimentmean                  float32
sentimentcount                   int64
companyNamefirst                object
timestamp_localfirst    datetime64[ns]
tickerfirst                     object
text                      object
dtype: object

and I try to save it using pd.to_stata

daily_news.to_stata( "mypath/data.dta",convert_dates= {'obs_day' : 'td'})

and I get

daily_news.to_stata( "python_news.dta",convert_dates= {'obs_day' : 'td'})
Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<ipython-input-9-3d9426807f61>", line 1, in <module>
    daily_news.to_stata( "python_news.dta",convert_dates= {'obs_day' : 'td'})

  File "C:\Users\m1hxb02\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\frame.py", line 1456, in to_stata
    write_index=write_index)

  File "C:\Users\m1hxb02\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\stata.py", line 1859, in __init__
    self._prepare_pandas(data)

  File "C:\Users\m1hxb02\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\stata.py", line 2043, in _prepare_pandas
    self.fmtlist.append(_dtype_to_default_stata_fmt(dtype, data[col]))

  File "C:\Users\m1hxb02\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda2\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\stata.py", line 1802, in _dtype_to_default_stata_fmt
    "Please report an error to the developers." % dtype)

ValueError: Data type datetime64[ns] not currently understood. Please report an error to the developers.

[jreback]

pls pd.show_versions() and provide a reproducible example.

IIRC this is simply not supported

cc @kshedden this should be NotImplementedError in this case

[randomgambit]

pd.show_versions()


INSTALLED VERSIONS
------------------
commit: None
python: 2.7.11.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Windows
OS-release: 7
machine: AMD64
processor: Intel64 Family 6 Model 63 Stepping 2, GenuineIntel
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: en_US

pandas: 0.17.1
nose: 1.3.7
pip: 7.1.2
setuptools: 18.5
Cython: 0.23.4
numpy: 1.10.1
scipy: 0.16.0
statsmodels: None
IPython: 4.0.1
sphinx: 1.3.1
patsy: 0.4.0
dateutil: 2.4.2
pytz: 2015.7
blosc: None
bottleneck: 1.0.0
tables: 3.2.2
numexpr: 2.4.4
matplotlib: 1.5.0
openpyxl: 2.2.6
xlrd: 0.9.4
xlwt: 1.0.0
xlsxwriter: 0.7.7
lxml: 3.4.4
bs4: 4.4.1
html5lib: None
httplib2: None
apiclient: None
sqlalchemy: 1.0.9
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
Jinja2: None

I ll try to get a working example.
what do you mean by IIRC this is simply not supported?

thanks!

[kshedden]

Try converting the datetime64 to an array of datetimes, some examples here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13703720/converting-between-datetime-timestamp-and-datetime64

[bashtage]

This error is happening because the call to_stata is being used on a DF that has datetimes but these have not been included in the convert_dates dict. If you included keys for all datetime columns, this command should work as expected.

Will try a PR that will default to tc type which is close to datetime64, only using ms rather than ns.