Converting strings to floats in a DataFrame

Question

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

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])

In a newer version of pandas (0.17 and up), you can use to_numeric function. It allows you to convert the whole dataframe or just individual columns. It also gives you an ability to select how to treat stuff that can't be converted to numeric values:

import pandas as pd
s = pd.Series(['1.0', '2', -3])
pd.to_numeric(s)
s = pd.Series(['apple', '1.0', '2', -3])
pd.to_numeric(s, errors='ignore')
pd.to_numeric(s, errors='coerce')

df['MyColumnName'] = df['MyColumnName'].astype('float64') 

you have to replace empty strings ('') with np.nan before converting to float. ie:

df['a']=df.a.replace('',np.nan).astype(float)