dt.weekday_name - attribute removed from Pandas v1.0.0

[nameloCmaS]

What happened?

Calling the weekday_name such as:
da.dt.weekday_name
raises an exception.

Looking into it more deeply, i.e. xarray source it can be seen the values are converted to a Pandas Series and the attribute called directly from that series.

This attribute was removed from Pandas in v1.0.0

Removed Timestamp.weekday_name, DatetimeIndex.weekday_name, and Series.dt.weekday_name (GH 18164)

It was replaced with the method day_name() - so the code would need to consider this case separately.

What did you expect to happen?

Return the weekday_name.

Minimal Complete Verifiable Example

import pandas as pd
import xarray as xr
da = xr.DataArray(pd.date_range("2024-01-15", periods=2))
day_name = da.dt.weekday_name

MVCE confirmation

• Minimal example — the example is as focused as reasonably possible to demonstrate the underlying issue in xarray.
• Complete example — the example is self-contained, including all data and the text of any traceback.
• Verifiable example — the example copy & pastes into an IPython prompt or Binder notebook, returning the result.
• New issue — a search of GitHub Issues suggests this is not a duplicate.
• Recent environment — the issue occurs with the latest version of xarray and its dependencies.

Relevant log output

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/Users/sam/Documents/GitHub/filebasedbim/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/xarray/core/accessor_dt.py", line 462, in weekday_name
    return self._date_field("weekday_name", object)
           ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Users/sam/Documents/GitHub/filebasedbim/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/xarray/core/accessor_dt.py", line 245, in _date_field
    result = _get_date_field(_index_or_data(self._obj), name, dtype)
             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Users/sam/Documents/GitHub/filebasedbim/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/xarray/core/accessor_dt.py", line 139, in _get_date_field
    out = access_method(values, name)
          ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
  File "/Users/sam/Documents/GitHub/filebasedbim/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/xarray/core/accessor_dt.py", line 97, in _access_through_series
    field_values = getattr(values_as_series.dt, name).values
                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
AttributeError: 'DatetimeProperties' object has no attribute 'weekday_name'

Anything else we need to know?

day_name() accepts a locale, and if not provided, defaults to 'en_US.utf8'.
Pandas also have the month_name() method which may be worth implementing at the same time.

Alternatively, if locale implementation is not desired, weekday_name should be depreciated and removed as Pandas > v1.5 is required.

Environment

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit: None
python: 3.12.0 (main, Oct 5 2023, 15:52:37) [Clang 14.0.3 (clang-1403.0.22.14.1)]
python-bits: 64
OS: Darwin
OS-release: 22.6.0
machine: x86_64
processor: i386
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: None
LOCALE: (None, 'UTF-8')
libhdf5: None
libnetcdf: None

xarray: 2023.12.0
pandas: 2.1.4
numpy: 1.26.2
scipy: None
netCDF4: None
pydap: None
h5netcdf: None
h5py: None
Nio: None
zarr: None
cftime: None
nc_time_axis: None
iris: None
bottleneck: None
dask: None
distributed: None
matplotlib: None
cartopy: None
seaborn: None
numbagg: None
fsspec: None
cupy: None
pint: None
sparse: None
flox: None
numpy_groupies: None
setuptools: 68.2.2
pip: 23.3.1
conda: None
pytest: 7.4.3
mypy: None
IPython: None
sphinx: None

[welcome]

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[max-sixty]

Thanks @nameloCmaS . We'd definitely take a PR for this.