Issues with try/except, attempting to convert strings to integers in pandas data frame where possible

Question

I made a function to clean up any HTML code/tags from strings in my dataframe. The function takes every value from the data frame, cleans it with the remove_html function, and returns a clean df. After converting the data frame to string values and cleaning it up I'm attempting to convert where possible the values in the data frame back to integers. I have tried try/except but don't get the result that I want. This is what I have at the moment:

def clean_df(df):
    df = df.astype(str)
    list_of_columns = list(df.columns)
    for col in list_of_columns:
        column = []
        for row in list(df[col]):
            column.append(remove_html(row))
            try:
                return int(row)
            except ValueError:
                pass

        del df[col]

        df[col] = column

    return df

Without the try/except statements the function returns a clean df where the integers are strings. So its just the try/except statement that seems to be an issue. I've tried the try/except statements in multiple ways and none of them return a df. The current code for example returns an 'int' object.

Answer 1

insert the columm.append into the try:

for col in list_of_columns:
    column = []
    for row in list(df[col]):
        try:
            column.append(remove_html(row))
        except ValueError:
            pass

    del df[col]

    df[col] = column

return df