How to get value of index column in pandas?

Question

I have a pandas data frame like following.

                  colName      
date        
2020-06-02 03:00:00 39

I can get value of each entry of colName using following. How to get date value?

for index, row in max_items.iterrows():
        print(str(row['colName]))
        // How to get date??

Answer 1

Anti-pattern Warning

First I want to highlight, this is an anti-pattern, using iteration is highly counterproductive. There are extremely rare cases when you need to iterate through the pandas dataframes. Essentially, Map, Apply and applymap can achieve results efficiently.

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Coming to the issue at hand: you need to convert your index to datetime if not already there.

Simple example:

# Creating the dataframe
df1 = pd.DataFrame({'date':pd.date_range(start='1/1/2018', end='1/03/2018'), 
                   'test_value_a':[5, 6, 9], 
                   'test_value_b':[2, 5, 1]})

# Coverting date column into index of type datetime.
df1.index = pd.to_datetime(df1.date)

# Dropping date column we had created
df1.drop(labels='date', axis="columns")

To print date, month, month name, day or day_name:

df1.index.date
df1.index.month
df1.index.month
df1.index.month_name
df1.index.day
df1.index.day_name

I would suggest read about loc, iloc and ix in the pandas' documentation that should help. I hope I didn't veer off from the crux of the question.