Converting Object Types Columns Into Numeric Type Using Pandas

I am trying to clean the data using pandas. When I execute df.datatypes it shows that the columns are of type objects. I wish to convert them into numeric types. I tried various wa

Solution 1:

From the help page of to_numeric, the description for errors is as follows:

errors : {'ignore', 'raise', 'coerce'}, default 'raise'
        - If 'raise', then invalid parsing will raise an exception
        - If 'coerce', then invalid parsing will be set as NaN
        - If 'ignore', then invalid parsing will return the input

If your apply returns your input without doing anything to it, then the reason is because you've non-convertible objects, and calling to_numeric with errors='ignore' isn't helping.

Try using the second option, errors='coerce'.

df = df.apply(pd.to_numeric, errors='coerce')

Or,

for c in df.columns:
    df[c] = pd.to_numeric(df[c], errors='coerce')

Also, infer_objects performs soft type-casting. If you want to check column dtypes, use df.dtypes instead.