Select Dataframe rows in a date range

Assume that just after reading, e.g. calling pd.read_csv, without any type conversion, your DataFrame contains:

   transaction_no  sales_order  is_delivered dispatch_date
0          2122.0          1.0          True    06-01-2020
1          2123.0          1.0          True    07-01-2020
2          2124.0          1.0          True    08-01-2020
3          2125.0          1.0          True    09-01-2020
4          2126.0          1.0          True    10-01-2020

To check column types run df.info() and the result should be something like:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 5 entries, 0 to 4
Data columns (total 4 columns):
 #   Column          Non-Null Count  Dtype  
---  ------          --------------  -----  
 0   transaction_no  5 non-null      float64
 1   sales_order     5 non-null      float64
 2   is_delivered    5 non-null      bool   
 3   dispatch_date   5 non-null      object 
dtypes: bool(1), float64(2), object(1)
memory usage: 165.0+ bytes

Note Dtype for dispatch_date column. It is object (more precisely, something other than a number, and actually - a string).

A good habit in working with Pandas object is to use its native datetime type, and not to use datetime module. This way your code will run substantially faster than if you used other date/time representation.

So the first step is to convert dispatch_date column from string to datetime. You can do it calling:

df.dispatch_date = pd.to_datetime(df.dispatch_date, dayfirst=True)

Now when you print df, you will get:

   transaction_no  sales_order  is_delivered dispatch_date
0          2122.0          1.0          True    2020-01-06
1          2123.0          1.0          True    2020-01-07
2          2124.0          1.0          True    2020-01-08
3          2125.0          1.0          True    2020-01-09
4          2126.0          1.0          True    2020-01-10

The first thing to notice is that now dispatch_date is printed in year-month-day format, but for now you may be not sure about its type. To check this detail, run df.info() again and the row concerning dispatch_date should be:

3   dispatch_date   5 non-null      datetime64[ns]

And if you want to retrieve rows for particular date range, you can e.g.:

• specify both border dates as strings, but also in year-month-day format,
• call df.query, passing both dates in the query string.

Something like:

df.query("dispatch_date.between('2020-01-07', '2020-01-09')")

The result is:

   transaction_no  sales_order  is_delivered dispatch_date
1          2123.0          1.0          True    2020-01-07
2          2124.0          1.0          True    2020-01-08
3          2125.0          1.0          True    2020-01-09

Note that the ending date is inclusive, contrary to the way how you specify Pandas slices, where the right border is exclusive.

I deliberately didn't go into such details like how to extract both date strings from your source data, this is another issue and you should cope with it alone.