How do I change data-type of pandas data frame to string with a defined format

Question

I m starting to tear my hair out with this - so I hope someone can help  I have a pandas DataFrame that was created from an Excel spreadsheet using openpyxl  The resulting DataFrame looks like   print image name data      id           image name 0  1001  1001 mar2014 report 1  1002  1002 mar2014 report 2  1003  1003 mar2014 report   3 rows x 2 columns       with the following datatypes   print image name data dtypes id            float64 image name     object dtype  object   The issue is that the numbers in the id column are  in fact  identification numbers and I need to treat them as strings  I ve tried converting the id column to strings using   image name data  id     image name data  id   astype  str     This seems a bit ugly but it does produce a variable of type  object  rather than  float64    print image name data dyptes id            object image name    object dtype  object   However  the strings that are created have a decimal point  as shown   print image name data        id           image name 0  1001 0  1001 mar2014 report 1  1002 0  1002 mar2014 report 2  1003 0  1003 mar2014 report   3 rows x 2 columns    How can I convert a float64 column in a pandas DataFrame to a string with a given format  in this case  for example    10 0f

User · Accepted Answer

I m unable to reproduce your problem but have you tried converting it to an integer first   image name data  id     image name data  id   astype int  astype  str     Then  regarding your more general question you could use map  as in this answer   In your case   image name data  id     image name data  id   map     0f   format

User · Answer

If you could reload this  you might be able to use dtypes argument    pd read csv      dtype   COL NAME   str

User · Answer

I m putting this in a new answer because no linebreaks   codeblocks in comments  I assume you want those nans to turn into a blank string  I couldn t find a nice way to do this  only do the ugly method   s   pd Series  1001  1002  None   a   s loc s isnull    fillna     b   s loc s notnull    astype int  astype str  result   pd concat  a b

[python] How do I change data-type of pandas data frame to string with a defined format?

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