pandas convert strings to float for multiple columns in dataframe

Question

I'm new to pandas and trying to figure out how to convert multiple columns which are formatted as strings to float64's. Currently I'm doing the below, but it seems like apply() or applymap() should be able to accomplish this task even more efficiently...unfortunately I'm a bit too much of a rookie to figure out how. Currently the values are percentages formatted as strings like '15.5%'

for column in ['field1', 'field2', 'field3']:
    data[column] = data[column].str.rstrip('%').astype('float64') / 100

Answer 1

df.applymap(lambda x:float(x.rstrip('%'))/100)

Answer 2

Starting in 0.11.1 (coming out this week), replace has a new option to replace with a regex, so this becomes possible

In [14]: df = DataFrame('10.0%',index=range(100),columns=range(10))

In [15]: df.replace('%','',regex=True).astype('float')/100
Out[15]: 
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 100 entries, 0 to 99
Data columns (total 10 columns):
0    100  non-null values
1    100  non-null values
2    100  non-null values
3    100  non-null values
4    100  non-null values
5    100  non-null values
6    100  non-null values
7    100  non-null values
8    100  non-null values
9    100  non-null values
dtypes: float64(10)

And a bit faster

In [16]: %timeit df.replace('%','',regex=True).astype('float')/100
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.16 ms per loop

 In [18]: %timeit df.applymap(lambda x: float(x[:-1]))/100
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.67 ms per loop

Answer 3

answering a comment in the accepted answer: for specific columns make sure you don't do it inplace.

df['Column1'] = df['Column1'].replace('%','',regex=True).astype('float')/100