Trying to convert GeoPandas Dataframe with date to ESRI Shapefile

Question

Created a GeoPandas dataframe from an excel sheet. The schema for the dataframe is:

{'geometry': 'Point',
 'properties': OrderedDict([
        ...
              ('DISTID', 'int'),
              ('PROVID', 'int'),
              ('date', 'datetime')])}

Edit: Thought I should clarify - the date field is saved as type datetime, but it only has date.

But when I run gdf.to_file('sample.shp', driver = "ESRI Shapefile") I get the error DriverSupportError: ESRI Shapefile does not support datetime fields.

I tried converting the datetime field to date by using gdf['date'] = pd.to_datetime(gdf['date']).dt.date but then that throws a ValueError: Invalid field type <class 'datetime.date'>. Kind of stumped on what to do, I'd like to keep the dates in the Shapefile. I'm using GeoPandas version 0.11.0 and Fionas 1.8.21.

Edit 2: Should have been more specific with what I tried. I attempted to change the field type using the solutions here Changing shapefile's field type using fiona? to no avail. If I try to change the schema, I get ValueError: Record does not match collection schema:.

I then tried to use the gdf['date'] = pd.to_datetime(gdf['date']).date() but the fucntion didn't even run, giving me AttributeError: 'Series' object has no attribute 'date'. Then I did gdf['date'] = pd.to_datetime(gdf['date']).dt.date, and while the function worked, I got ValueError: Invalid field type <class 'datetime.date'> when trying to export as a shapefile.

Edit 3:

the entire excel file, when exported as a pandas dateframe, has only one field 'date' with type datetime64[ns]. The dates are all in the form . They do not have any time attached.

I do the following:

pdf = pd.read_excel("data.xlsx", index_col=0)
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(pdf, geometry=gpd.points_from_xy(pdf.Longitude, pdf.Latitude))

First, I tried:

gdf['date'] = pd.to_datetime(gdf['date']).dt.date

Tried to export to shapefile using gdf.to_file('sample.shp', driver = "ESRI Shapefile"), gave me ValueError: Invalid field type <class 'datetime.date'>

Tried to simply convert it to a string, and then export, as suggested in the answer.

gdf['date'] = gdf['date'].dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')

but this didn't work either. When I did gdf.info() it would show that the type was no longer datetime, but object instead. And yet it throws ValueError: Invalid field type <class 'datetime.time'>

Answer 1

Convert the datetimes to strings/objects.

I have a datetime field called date:

import geopandas as gpd

df = gpd.read_file('/home/bera/GIS/Data/lämningar_sverige.gpkg', layer='lämningar_sverige_point')
df['date'] = df['date'].dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d') #Convert the datetimes to strings
df.to_file('/home/bera/Desktop/GIStest/datetimes.shp')