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I have a column in a Pandas dataframe which has mixed values, i.e. strings, floats and numbers. I would like to convert all values in this column to strings, but it does not let me as it says:

df['text'] = df['text'].astype(str)

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\u201d' in position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

I know that normally you can just convert a float by using 

 str(0.05) --> '0.05'

But now when I cast the column as string, it still leaves the floats as floats.

Grr
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Probs
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  • Possible duplicate of [UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa0' in position 20: ordinal not in range(128)](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9942594/unicodeencodeerror-ascii-codec-cant-encode-character-u-xa0-in-position-20) – DYZ Apr 10 '17 at 15:39

1 Answers1

3

Since the column is unicode, you could try to encode it:

df['text'] = df['text'].apply(lambda x: x.encode('utf-8').strip())
fedterzi
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