Unexpected exception on column with NaT

[lebigot]

Code Sample

import pandas as pd
import datetime

# 4 examples:

df = pd.DataFrame({0: [1, None]})  # Works
df = pd.DataFrame({0: [None, 1]})  # Works

df = pd.DataFrame({0: [None, datetime.datetime.now()]})  # Exception

# Problem demonstration:
df != df.iloc[0]  # Works with numeric column, fails with NaT

Problem description & expected output.

In the above code, the final test raises an exception with the datetime example, but works with the two numeric examples.

I would expect the NaT case to behave like the numeric example.

Note: a column with datetimes but no NaT makes df != df.iloc[0] work as expected.

Expected Output

I expect the result to be, like for numeric values, a dataframe that answers the question "is the value identical to that in the first row?" (as a dataframe with the same shape).

Output of pd.show_versions()

<details>
INSTALLED VERSIONS
------------------
commit: None
python: 3.6.2.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Darwin
OS-release: 16.7.0
machine: x86_64
processor: i386
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE: en_US.UTF-8

pandas: 0.20.3
pytest: 3.2.2
pip: 9.0.1
setuptools: 36.3.0
Cython: 0.26.1
numpy: 1.13.1
scipy: 0.19.1
xarray: None
IPython: 6.1.0
sphinx: 1.6.3
patsy: 0.4.1
dateutil: 2.6.1
pytz: 2017.2
blosc: None
bottleneck: 1.2.1
tables: 3.4.2
numexpr: 2.6.2
feather: None
matplotlib: 2.0.2
openpyxl: 2.5.0a3
xlrd: 1.1.0
xlwt: 1.2.0
xlsxwriter: 0.9.8
lxml: 3.8.0
bs4: 4.6.0
html5lib: 0.9999999
sqlalchemy: 1.1.13
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
jinja2: 2.9.6
s3fs: None
pandas_gbq: None
pandas_datareader: None
</details>

[jreback]

duplicate of #15697

in generaly comparing directly against a NaN value will fail intuition, if you want to compare use .isnull/.notnull, see docs reference in the other issue.

[lebigot]

This issue should definitely be reopened: it is not a duplicate of the issue referenced above, which is about the NaT/NaN semantics. Instead, as described in the original post above, I am talking about the exception being raised when the code should instead just run.

[jorisvandenbossche]

This is indeed not a duplicate, as far as I can see.

[jorisvandenbossche]

So the fact that seems to make the difference is that here you are comparing to a Series, and not a scalar (the scalar case works 'fine', except from the behavioural bug from #15697 that it should be False instead of True):

In [133]: df
Out[133]: 
                           0
0                        NaT
1 2017-09-18 19:00:27.589018

In [134]: df == pd.NaT
Out[134]: 
      0
0  True
1  True

In [135]: df == df.iloc[0, 0]
Out[135]: 
      0
0  True
1  True

In [136]: df == df.iloc[0]
...
TypeError: Could not operate array([-9223372036854775808]) with block values boolean index did not match indexed array along dimension 0; dimension is 2 but corresponding boolean dimension is 1