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

The "data['values'].str.strip()" answer above did not work for me, but I found a simple work around. I am sure there is a better way to do this. The str.strip() function works on Series. Thus, I converted the dataframe column into a Series, stripped the whitespace, replaced the converted column back into the dataframe. Below is the example code.

import pandas as pd
data = pd.DataFrame({'values': ['   ABC   ', '   DEF', '  GHI  ']})
print ('-----')
print (data)

data['values'].str.strip()
print ('-----')
print (data)

new = pd.Series([])
new = data['values'].str.strip()
data['values'] = new
print ('-----')
print (new)