How can I remove \xa0$ from my dataframe?

Question

I am trying to clean my data which contains by making the columns[1:] float types.

for col_i in new_col_titles[1:]:
    df[col_i] = df[col_i].astype(float)

However, I get the following error.

ValueError: could not convert string to float: '\xa0$ 25,507,036'

I have tried to use df = df.replace('\x0$','') but I have so far had no luck

Can you try `df[col_i] = df[col_i].str.replace('\x0$', '').astype(float)`? — Marat, Aug 30 '20 at 19:06
SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 0-2: truncated \xXX escape — JPWilson, Aug 30 '20 at 19:10
still returns \xa0$ 25,507,036 when I did \xao it did this error though "could not convert string to float: '$ 25,507,036'" — JPWilson, Aug 30 '20 at 19:36
I managed to remove the \xao but it now shows this $ 25507036', '$ 21550568', '$ 21576850' when i do print (df.astype(str).values.tolist()) But I cant seem to use replace to remove the dollar sign — JPWilson, Aug 30 '20 at 20:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 30 '20 at 20:20

I solved it in a multistep process, Im sure someone can clean this up a little but for anyone else who is stuck by this:

   for col_i in new_col_titles:
        df[col_i] = df[col_i].astype(str)
        df[col_i] = df[col_i].str.replace('\xa0', '', regex=True)
        df[col_i] = df[col_i].str.replace('$', '', regex=True)

How can I remove \xa0$ from my dataframe?

1 Answers1