Checking if a data series is strings

Question

I want to check if a column in a dataframe contains strings. I would have thought this could be done just by checking dtype, but that isn't the case. A pandas series that contains strings just has dtype 'object', which is also used for other data structures (like lists):

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1,2,3], 'b': ['Hello', '1', '2'], 'c': [[1],[2],[3]]})

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': [1,2,3], 'b': ['Hello', '1', '2'], 'c': [[1],[2],[3]]})
print(df['a'].dtype)
print(df['b'].dtype)
print(df['c'].dtype)

Produces:

int64
object
object

Is there some way of checking if a column contains only strings?

Answer 1

You can use this to see if all elements in a column are strings

df.applymap(type).eq(str).all()

a    False
b     True
c    False
dtype: bool

To just check if any are strings

df.applymap(type).eq(str).any()