What's new in 1.2.2 (February ??, 2021)

These are the changes in pandas 1.2.2. See :ref:`release` for a full changelog including other versions of pandas.

Fixed regressions

Fixed regression in :func:`read_excel` that caused it to raise AttributeError when checking version of older xlrd versions (:issue:`38955`)
Fixed regression in :class:`DataFrame` constructor reordering element when construction from datetime ndarray with dtype not "datetime64[ns]" (:issue:`39422`)
Fixed regression in :class:`DataFrame.astype` and :class:`Series.astype` not casting to bytes dtype (:issue:`39474`)
Fixed regression in :meth:`~DataFrame.to_pickle` failing to create bz2/xz compressed pickle files with protocol=5 (:issue:`39002`)
Fixed regression in :func:`pandas.testing.assert_series_equal` and :func:`pandas.testing.assert_frame_equal` always raising AssertionError when comparing extension dtypes (:issue:`39410`)
Fixed regression in :meth:`~DataFrame.to_csv` opening codecs.StreamWriter in binary mode instead of in text mode and ignoring user-provided mode (:issue:`39247`)

:func:`pandas.read_excel` error message when a specified sheetname does not exist is now uniform across engines (:issue:`39250`)
Fixed bug in :func:`pandas.read_excel` producing incorrect results when the engine openpyxl is used and the excel file is missing or has incorrect dimension information; the fix requires openpyxl >= 3.0.0, prior versions may still fail (:issue:`38956`, :issue:`39001`)

.. contributors:: v1.2.1..v1.2.2|HEAD