Efficiently Convert Timezones In Pandas Dataframe

I have a large pandas dataframe (tens of millions of rows) which includes a column for UTC time and the time zone. I want to create a column which contains the local time for the r

Solution 1:

Demo:

Source DF:

In [11]: df
Out[11]:
             datetime         time_zone
0 2016-09-19 01:29:13    America/Bogota
1 2016-09-19 02:16:04  America/New_York
2 2016-09-19 01:57:54      Africa/Cairo
3 2016-09-19 11:00:00    America/Bogota
4 2016-09-19 12:00:00  America/New_York
5 2016-09-19 13:00:00      Africa/Cairo

Answer :

In [12]: df['new'] =  df.groupby('time_zone')['datetime'] \
                        .transform(lambda x: x.dt.tz_localize(x.name))

In [13]: df
Out[13]:
             datetime         time_zone                 new
0 2016-09-19 01:29:13    America/Bogota 2016-09-19 06:29:13
1 2016-09-19 02:16:04  America/New_York 2016-09-19 06:16:04
2 2016-09-19 01:57:54      Africa/Cairo 2016-09-18 23:57:54
3 2016-09-19 11:00:00    America/Bogota 2016-09-19 16:00:00
4 2016-09-19 12:00:00  America/New_York 2016-09-19 16:00:00
5 2016-09-19 13:00:00      Africa/Cairo 2016-09-19 11:00:00