Unfortauntely, nearly no input data file uses ISO format but rather random columns and formats. Following https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/pydata/pZjQMX_avmY and https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/854 I would suggest to insert: https://github.com/pydata/pandas/tree/master/pandas/tseries/converters.py Where users could contribute/share typical converters for getting their date and times parsed into a pandas object from input.