How to treat NULL as a normal string with pandas?

Question

I have a csv-file with a column with strings and I want to read it with pandas. In this file the string null occurs as an actual value and should not be regarde

Answer 1

You can specify a converters argument for the string column.

pd.read_csv(StringIO(data), converters={'strings' : str})

  strings  numbers
0     foo        1
1     bar        2
2    null        3

This will by-pass pandas' automatic parsing.

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Another option is setting na_filter=False:

pd.read_csv(StringIO(data), na_filter=False)

  strings  numbers
0     foo        1
1     bar        2
2    null        3

This works for the entire DataFrame, so use with caution. I recommend first option if you want to surgically apply this to select columns instead.