Request to add more date formats in to_json method

[chankeypathak]

Problem description

to_json method provides date in either epoch or iso format. Would be nice if we can support more date formats like UTC, GMT etc.

[gfyoung]

@chankeypathak : Thanks for the report! If it's not to difficult to do, I wouldn't be opposed. My only concern is the maintenance costs vs. the actual benefit for our end users as a whole.

cc @jreback

[austinlostinboston]

@gfyoung agreed about maintenance. What if date_format took a strf string so the user could create their own output format? My big complaint here is that iso add's a Z to the end of the timestamp, locking the time into UTC moving forward. Of course if can be stripped out, but that comes off both dirty and unnecessary. Thoughts?

[jreback]

JSON is somewhat standardized in dates with iso and epoch so this is leading to even more confusion

-1 on expanding this
if you want to have a column of specialized dates then just create a string column

[pablodz]

Well, exceptions are not the rule, as gfyoung says, this makes pandas's library more difficult to maintain in long term and the costs related vs the benefit.