Converting strings to floats in a DataFrame

How to covert a DataFrame column containing strings and NaN values to floats. And there is another column whose values are strings and floats; how to convert this entire column to floats.

Solution 1:

NOTE: pd.convert_objects has now been deprecated. You should use pd.Series.astype(float) or pd.to_numeric as described in other answers.

This is available in 0.11. Forces conversion (or set's to nan) This will work even when astype will fail; its also series by series so it won't convert say a complete string column

In [10]: df = DataFrame(dict(A = Series(['1.0','1']), B = Series(['1.0','foo'])))

In [11]: df
Out[11]: 
     A    B
0  1.0  1.0
1    1  foo

In [12]: df.dtypes
Out[12]: 
A    object
B    object
dtype: object

In [13]: df.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)
Out[13]: 
   A   B
0  1   1
1  1 NaN

In [14]: df.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True).dtypes
Out[14]: 
A    float64
B    float64
dtype: object

Solution 2:

You can try df.column_name = df.column_name.astype(float). As for the NaN values, you need to specify how they should be converted, but you can use the .fillna method to do it.

Example:

In [12]: df
Out[12]: 
     a    b
0  0.1  0.2
1  NaN  0.3
2  0.4  0.5

In [13]: df.a.values
Out[13]: array(['0.1', nan, '0.4'], dtype=object)

In [14]: df.a = df.a.astype(float).fillna(0.0)

In [15]: df
Out[15]: 
     a    b
0  0.1  0.2
1  0.0  0.3
2  0.4  0.5

In [16]: df.a.values
Out[16]: array([ 0.1,  0. ,  0.4])