How to convert this string to datetime and date alone - date

Question

This question is far from unique, but i cannot find a way to convert the strings that are contained in this df column to datetime and date alone objects in order to use them as the index of my dataframe.
How can i convert this string to datetime or date format to use it as an index on my df?
The format of this column in particular is as follows:
>>> data['DateTime']
0 20140101 00:00:00
1 20140101 00:00:00
3 20140101 00:00:00
4 20140101 00:00:00
5 20140101 00:00:00
6 20140101 00:00:00
7 20140101 00:00:00
8 20140101 00:00:00
9 20140101 00:00:00
10 20140101 00:00:00
Name: DateTime, Length: 3779, dtype: object

Answer 1

Use to_datetime to convert to a string to a datetime, you can pass a formatting string but in this case it seems to handle it fine, then if you wanted a date then call apply and use a lambda to call .date() on each datetime entry:
In [59]:
df = pd.DataFrame({'DateTime':['20140101 00:00:00']*10})
df
Out[59]:
DateTime
0 20140101 00:00:00
1 20140101 00:00:00
2 20140101 00:00:00
3 20140101 00:00:00
4 20140101 00:00:00
5 20140101 00:00:00
6 20140101 00:00:00
7 20140101 00:00:00
8 20140101 00:00:00
9 20140101 00:00:00
In [60]:
df['DateTime'] = pd.to_datetime(df['DateTime'])
df.dtypes
Out[60]:
DateTime datetime64[ns]
dtype: object
In [61]:
df['DateTime'] = df['DateTime'].apply(lambda x:x.date())
print(df)
df.dtypes
DateTime
0 2014-01-01
1 2014-01-01
2 2014-01-01
3 2014-01-01
4 2014-01-01
5 2014-01-01
6 2014-01-01
7 2014-01-01
8 2014-01-01
9 2014-01-01
Out[61]:
DateTime object
dtype: object