Convert string to date format in python pandas dataframe

Here's my attempt at it, I think it should work, although I'm not sure on the process you want to use for checking if it's the current date.

The first part will tidy things up slightly and take the string of every row and convert it to a date time object.

The second part of this that does check will spit out a column that gives either True/False based on your system clock for each row. This was done with python 3.5.2.

import string
import pandas as pd
import datetime

#Converts each string into a datetime object
def convert_date(row):
    trim_date = row[4:-4]
    remove_punc = trim_date.translate(trim_date.maketrans('','',string.punctuation))
    return datetime.datetime.strptime('2017 ' + remove_punc, '%Y %d %b %H%M')

df['datetime_convert'] = df['from'].apply(convert_date)

#Creates column to check if every value matches the current time on your system
def check_is_now(row):
    if str(row) == datetime.datetime.today().strftime('%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:00')::
        return True
    else:
        return False


df['is_now'] = df['datetime_convert'].apply(check_is_now)