Replace specific value in pandas dataframe column, else convert column to numeric

Question

Given the following pandas dataframe

+----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+
|    |   AgeAt_X        |   AgeAt_Y                           |   AgeAt_Z                      |
|----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+
|  0 |   Older than 100 |                      Older than 100 |                          74.13 |
|  1 |              nan |                                 nan |                          58.46 |
|  2 |              nan |                                 8.4 |                          54.15 |
|  3 |              nan |                                 nan |                          57.04 |
|  4 |              nan |                               57.04 |                            nan |
+----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+

how can I replace values in specific columns which equal Older than 100 with nan

+----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+
|    |   AgeAt_X        |   AgeAt_Y                           |   AgeAt_Z                      |
|----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+
|  0 |              nan |                                 nan |                          74.13 |
|  1 |              nan |                                 nan |                          58.46 |
|  2 |              nan |                                 8.4 |                          54.15 |
|  3 |              nan |                                 nan |                          57.04 |
|  4 |              nan |                               57.04 |                            nan |
+----+------------------+-------------------------------------+--------------------------------+

Notes

• After removing the Older than 100 string from the desired columns, I convert the columns to numeric in order to perform calculations on said columns.
• There are other columns in this dataframe (that I have excluded from this example), which will not be converted to numeric, so the conversion to numeric must be done one column at a time.

What I've tried

Attempt 1

if df.isin('Older than 100'):
    df.loc[df['AgeAt_X']] = ''
else:
    df['AgeAt_X'] = pd.to_numeric(df["AgeAt_X"])

Attempt 2

if df.loc[df['AgeAt_X']] == 'Older than 100r':
    df.loc[df['AgeAt_X']] = ''
elif df.loc[df['AgeAt_X']] == '':
    df['AgeAt_X'] = pd.to_numeric(df["AgeAt_X"])

Attempt 3

df['AgeAt_X'] = ['' if ele == 'Older than 100' else df.loc[df['AgeAt_X']] for ele in df['AgeAt_X']]

Attempts 1, 2 and 3 return the following error:

KeyError: 'None of [0 NaN\n1 NaN\n2 NaN\n3 NaN\n4 NaN\n5 NaN\n6 NaN\n7 NaN\n8 NaN\n9 NaN\n10 NaN\n11 NaN\n12 NaN\n13 NaN\n14 NaN\n15 NaN\n16 NaN\n17 NaN\n18 NaN\n19 NaN\n20 NaN\n21 NaN\n22 NaN\n23 NaN\n24 NaN\n25 NaN\n26 NaN\n27 NaN\n28 NaN\n29 NaN\n ..\n6332 NaN\n6333 NaN\n6334 NaN\n6335 NaN\n6336 NaN\n6337 NaN\n6338 NaN\n6339 NaN\n6340 NaN\n6341 NaN\n6342 NaN\n6343 NaN\n6344 NaN\n6345 NaN\n6346 NaN\n6347 NaN\n6348 NaN\n6349 NaN\n6350 NaN\n6351 NaN\n6352 NaN\n6353 NaN\n6354 NaN\n6355 NaN\n6356 NaN\n6357 NaN\n6358 NaN\n6359 NaN\n6360 NaN\n6361 NaN\nName: AgeAt_X, Length: 6362, dtype: float64] are in the [index]'

Attempt 4

df['AgeAt_X'] = df['AgeAt_X'].replace({'Older than 100': ''})

Attempt 4 returns the following error:

TypeError: Cannot compare types 'ndarray(dtype=float64)' and 'str'

I've also looked at a few posts. The two below do not actually replace the value but create a new column derived from others

Replace specific values in Pandas DataFrame

Pandas replace DataFrame values

Answer 1

We can loop through each column and check if the sentence is present. If we get a hit, we replace the sentence with NaN with Series.str.replace and right after convert it to numeric with Series.astype, in this case float:

df.dtypes
AgeAt_X     object
AgeAt_Y     object
AgeAt_Z    float64
dtype: object

sent = 'Older than 100'

for col in df.columns:
    if sent in df[col].values:
        df[col] = df[col].str.replace(sent, 'NaN')
        df[col] = df[col].astype(float)

print(df)
   AgeAt_X  AgeAt_Y  AgeAt_Z
0      NaN      NaN    74.13
1      NaN      NaN    58.46
2      NaN     8.40    54.15
3      NaN      NaN    57.04
4      NaN    57.04      NaN

df.dtypes
AgeAt_X    float64
AgeAt_Y    float64
AgeAt_Z    float64
dtype: object