How to fill dataframe Nan values with empty list [] in pandas?

Question

This is my dataframe:

          date                          ids
0     2011-04-23  [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,...
1     2011-04-24  [0,         


        

Answer 1

Maybe not the most short/optimized solution, but I think is pretty readable:

# Packages
import ast

# Masking-in nans
mask = df['ids'].isna()

# Filling nans with a list-like string and literally-evaluating such string
df.loc[mask, 'ids'] = df.loc[mask, 'ids'].fillna('[]').apply(ast.literal_eval)

The drawback is that you need to load the ast package.

EDIT

I recently figured out the existence of the eval() built-in. This avoids importing any extra package.

# Masking-in nans
mask = df['ids'].isna()

# Filling nans with a list-like string and literally-evaluating such string
df.loc[mask, 'ids'] = df.loc[mask, 'ids'].fillna('[]').apply(eval)