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

You can use the apply function of the Series object:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([['  a  ', 10], ['  c  ', 5]])
>>> df[0][0]
'  a  '
>>> df[0] = df[0].apply(lambda x: x.strip())
>>> df[0][0]
'a'

Note the usage of strip and not the regex which is much faster

Another option - use the apply function of the DataFrame object:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([['  a  ', 10], ['  c  ', 5]])
>>> df.apply(lambda x: x.apply(lambda y: y.strip() if type(y) == type('') else y), axis=0)

   0   1
0  a  10
1  c   5