Timedeltas

Along with the powerful timestamp object, which acts as a building block for the DatetimeIndex, there is another useful data structure, which has been introduced in Pandas 0.15 – the Timedelta. The Timedelta can serve as a basis for indices as well, in this case a TimedeltaIndex.

Timedeltas are differences in times, expressed in difference units. The Timedelta class in Pandas is a subclass of datetime.timedelta from the Python standard library. As with other Pandas data structures, the Timedelta can be constructed from a variety of inputs:

>>> pd.Timedelta('1 days')
Timedelta('1 days 00:00:00')
>>> pd.Timedelta('-1 days 2 min 10s 3us')
Timedelta('-2 days +23:57:49.999997')
>>> pd.Timedelta(days=1,seconds=1)
Timedelta('1 days 00:00:01')

As you would expect, Timedeltas allow basic arithmetic:

>>> pd.Timedelta(days=1) + pd.Timedelta(seconds=1)
Timedelta('1 days 00:00:01')

Similar to to_datetime, there is a to_timedelta function that can parse strings...