Pythonic/efficient way to strip whitespace from every Pandas Data frame cell that has a stringlike object in it

I'm reading a CSV file into a DataFrame. I need to strip whitespace from all the stringlike cells, leaving the other cells unchanged in Python 2.7.

Here is what I'm doing:

def remove_whitespace( x ):
    if isinstance( x, basestring ):
        return x.strip()
    else:
        return x

my_data = my_data.applymap( remove_whitespace )

Is there a better or more idiomatic to Pandas way to do this?

Is there a more efficient way (perhaps by doing things column wise)?

I've tried searching for a definitive answer, but most questions on this topic seem to be how to strip whitespace from the column names themselves, or presume the cells are all strings.

Stumbled onto this question while looking for a quick and minimalistic snippet I could use. Had to assemble one myself from posts above. Maybe someone will find it useful:

data_frame_trimmed = data_frame.apply(lambda x: x.str.strip() if x.dtype == "object" else x)

You could use pandas' Series.str.strip() method to do this quickly for each string-like column:

>>> data = pd.DataFrame({'values': ['   ABC   ', '   DEF', '  GHI  ']})
>>> data
      values
0     ABC   
1        DEF
2      GHI  

>>> data['values'].str.strip()
0    ABC
1    DEF
2    GHI
Name: values, dtype: object

We want to:

1. Apply our function to each element in our dataframe - use applymap.

2. Use type(x)==str (versus x.dtype == 'object') because Pandas will label columns as object for columns of mixed datatypes (an object column may contain int and/or str).

3. Maintain the datatype of each element (we don't want to convert everything to a str and then strip whitespace).

Therefore, I've found the following to be the easiest:

df.applymap(lambda x: x.strip() if type(x)==str else x)

When you call pandas.read_csv, you can use a regular expression that matches zero or more spaces followed by a comma followed by zero or more spaces as the delimiter.

For example, here's "data.csv":

In [19]: !cat data.csv
1.5, aaa,  bbb ,  ddd     , 10 ,  XXX   
2.5, eee, fff  ,       ggg, 20 ,     YYY

(The first line ends with three spaces after XXX, while the second line ends at the last Y.)

The following uses pandas.read_csv() to read the files, with the regular expression ' *, *' as the delimiter. (Using a regular expression as the delimiter is only available in the "python" engine of read_csv().)

In [20]: import pandas as pd

In [21]: df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', header=None, delimiter=' *, *', engine='python')

In [22]: df
Out[22]: 
     0    1    2    3   4    5
0  1.5  aaa  bbb  ddd  10  XXX
1  2.5  eee  fff  ggg  20  YYY

The "data['values'].str.strip()" answer above did not work for me, but I found a simple work around. I am sure there is a better way to do this. The str.strip() function works on Series. Thus, I converted the dataframe column into a Series, stripped the whitespace, replaced the converted column back into the dataframe. Below is the example code.

import pandas as pd
data = pd.DataFrame({'values': ['   ABC   ', '   DEF', '  GHI  ']})
print ('-----')
print (data)

data['values'].str.strip()
print ('-----')
print (data)

new = pd.Series([])
new = data['values'].str.strip()
data['values'] = new
print ('-----')
print (new)

Here is a column-wise solution with pandas apply:

import numpy as np

def strip_obj(col):
    if col.dtypes == object:
        return (col.astype(str)
                   .str.strip()
                   .replace({'nan': np.nan}))
    return col

df = df.apply(strip_obj, axis=0)

This will convert values in object type columns to string. Should take caution with mixed-type columns. For example if your column is zip codes with 20001 and ' 21110 ' you will end up with '20001' and '21110'.

This worked for me - applies it to the whole dataframe:

def panda_strip(x):
    r =[]
    for y in x:
        if isinstance(y, str):
            y = y.strip()

        r.append(y)
    return pd.Series(r)

df = df.apply(lambda x: panda_strip(x))

I found the following code useful and something that would likely help others. This snippet will allow you to delete spaces in a column as well as in the entire DataFrame, depending on your use case.

import pandas as pd

def remove_whitespace(x):
    try:
        # remove spaces inside and outside of string
        x = "".join(x.split())

    except:
        pass
    return x

# Apply remove_whitespace to column only
df.orderId = df.orderId.apply(remove_whitespace)
print(df)


# Apply to remove_whitespace to entire Dataframe
df = df.applymap(remove_whitespace)
print(df)