Pythonic/efficient way to strip whitespace from every Pandas Data frame cell that has a stringlike object in it

Question

I\'m reading a CSV file into a DataFrame. I need to strip whitespace from all the stringlike cells, leaving the other cells unchanged in Python 2.7.

Here is what I\

Answer 1

We want to:

1. Apply our function to each element in our dataframe - use applymap.

2. Use type(x)==str (versus x.dtype == 'object') because Pandas will label columns as object for columns of mixed datatypes (an object column may contain int and/or str).

3. Maintain the datatype of each element (we don't want to convert everything to a str and then strip whitespace).

Therefore, I've found the following to be the easiest:

df.applymap(lambda x: x.strip() if type(x)==str else x)