Strip / trim all strings of a dataframe

Question

Cleaning the values of a multitype data frame in python/pandas, I want to trim the strings. I am currently doing it in two instructions :

import pandas as pd         


        

Answer 1

Money Shot

Here's a compact version of using applymap with a straightforward lambda expression to call strip only when the value is of a string type:

df.applymap(lambda x: x.strip() if isinstance(x, str) else x)

Full Example

A more complete example:

import pandas as pd


def trim_all_columns(df):
    """
    Trim whitespace from ends of each value across all series in dataframe
    """
    trim_strings = lambda x: x.strip() if isinstance(x, str) else x
    return df.applymap(trim_strings)


# simple example of trimming whitespace from data elements
df = pd.DataFrame([['  a  ', 10], ['  c  ', 5]])
df = trim_all_columns(df)
print(df)


>>>
   0   1
0  a  10
1  c   5

Working Example

Here's a working example hosted by trinket: https://trinket.io/python3/e6ab7fb4ab