Set max string length in pandas

Question

I want my dataframe to auto-truncate strings which are longer than a certain length.

basically:

pd.set_option(\'auto_truncate_string_exceeding_this_l         


        

Answer 1

You can use read_csv converters. Lets say you want to truncate column name abc, you can pass a dictionary with function like

def auto_truncate(val):
    return val[:255]
df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', converters={'abc': auto_truncate}

If you have columns with different lengths

df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', converters={'abc': lambda: x: x[:255], 'xyz': lambda: x: x[:512]}

Make sure column type is string. Column index can also be used instead of name in converters dict.