pandas read excel: do not parse numbers

Question

I am working with python pandas and MS excel to edit a xlsx file. I iterate between these programs back and forth. The file contains some columns with text that looks like numbers, e.g.,

If I read this, I get

pd.read_excel ('test.xlsx')
     A
0    1
1  100

and

pd.read_excel ('test.xlsx').dtypes
A    int64
dtype: object

My question is: how is it possible to read the text as text? It is not an option to parse it back after reading, because part of the information (i.e., the leading zeros) is lost upon conversion to a number.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

You can work around the known issue (assuming that you know the column name) by using the 'converters' parameter:

>>> pd.read_excel('test.xlsx', converters={'A': str})
     A
0  001
1  100
>>> pd.read_excel('test.xlsx', converters={'A': str}).dtypes
A    object
dtype: object

Answer 2

According to this issue, it's a known problem with pandas.