Replace only "," by "." in a String Python-CodePudding

i'm using a dataset that contains a column "Streams" dtype: object and i just need to replace "," by "." to later use pandas.to_numeric() and convert String by float64. Is there a way to replace only the characters and keep the numbers?

Example: 48,633,449 to 48.633.449

Code:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

dados = pd.read_csv("spotify_dataset.csv")

dados.dropna()
dados['Streams'].replace(",", ".")
dados['Streams'] = pd.to_numeric(dados['Streams'])
dados.head()

and got this:

ValueError: Unable to parse string "48,633,449" at position 0

[Error]

CodePudding user response：

You are throwing away your replace since you are not assigning it to anything. Unless you explicitly use inplace=True arguments, Pandas methods do not change the current instance of an object (Series, Dataframes).

You can provide the result of replace as the argument to the to_numeric function

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

dados = pd.read_csv("spotify_dataset.csv")

dados = dados.dropna()
dados['Streams'] = pd.to_numeric(dados['Streams'].replace(",", "."))
dados.head()

CodePudding user response：

You should be using .str.replace instead of just .replace.

dados['Streams'] = pd.to_numeric(dados['Streams'].str.replace(",", ""))

Also, I don't think your intention is to replace commas with decimals. That would result in the same error since multiple decimals are invalid.

CodePudding user response：

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

dados = pd.read_csv("spotify_dataset.csv")

dados = dados.dropna()
dados['Streams'] = dados['Streams'].replace(",", ".")
dados['Streams'] = pd.to_numeric(dados['Streams'])
dados.head()