Pandas change data type of Series to String

Question

I use Pandas  ver 0 12 0  with Python 2 7 and have a dataframe as below   df   pd DataFrame   id     123 512  zhub1   12354 3  129  753  295  610                        colour     black    white   white   white                                black    black    white    white                         shape     round    triangular    triangular   triangular   square                                            triangular   round   triangular                           columns    id   colour    shape      The id Series consists of some integers and strings  Its dtype by default is object  I want to convert all contents of id to strings  I tried astype str   which produces the output below   df  id   astype str  0    1 1    5 2    z 3    1 4    1 5    7 6    2 7    6   1  How can I convert all elements of id to String    2  I will eventually use id for indexing for dataframes  Would having String indices in a dataframe slow things down  compared to having an integer index

User · Answer

Your problem can easily be solved by converting it to the object first  After it is converted to object  just use  astype  to convert it to str   obj   lambda x x 1   df  id   df  id   apply obj  astype  str

User · Answer

Personally none of the above worked for me   What did    new str    str x  for x in old obj  0

User · Answer

You must assign it  like this -  df  id    df  id   astype str

User · Answer

A new answer to reflect the most current practices  as of version 1 0 1  neither astype  str   nor astype str  work    As per the documentation  a Series can be converted to the string datatype in the following ways   df  id     df  id   astype  string    df  id     pandas Series df  id    dtype  string    df  id     pandas Series df  id    dtype pandas StringDtype

User · Answer

You can use   df loc    id     df loc     id   astype str    This is why they recommend this solution   Pandas doc  TD LR  To reflect some of the answers   df  id     df  id   astype  string     This will break on the given example because it will try to convert to StringArray which can not handle any number in the  string     df  id    df  id   astype str    For me this solution throw some warning    gt  SettingWithCopyWarning     gt  A value is trying to be set on a copy of a  gt  slice from a DataFrame  Try using  loc row indexer col indexer    value instead

User · Answer

You can convert all elements of id to str using apply  df id apply str   0        123 1        512 2      zhub1 3    12354 3 4        129 5        753 6        295 7        610   Edit by OP   I think the issue was related to the Python version  2 7    this worked   df  id   astype basestring  0        123 1        512 2      zhub1 3    12354 3 4        129 5        753 6        295 7        610 Name  id  dtype  object

User · Answer

For me it worked   df  id   convert dtypes    see the documentation here  https   pandas pydata org pandas-docs stable reference api pandas DataFrame convert dtypes html

[python] Pandas: change data type of Series to String

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