Pandas: convert unicode strings to string

Question

I have data frame and there are 2 columns with unicode value. I need to convert it to string. I try df.domain.astype(str) but it return unicode strings. How can I do that? Data looks like (I need to convert either columns)

domain       search_term
vk.com           None
facebook.com     None
yandex.ru        снять квартиру
locals.ru        None
yandex.ru        снять квартиру без посредников в Москве
avito.ru         None

Answer 1

Would this help?:

for col in types[types=='unicode'].index:
    df[col] = df[col].astype(str)

or:

for col in types[types=='unicode'].index:
     df[col] = df[col].apply(lambda x: x.encode('utf-8').strip())