Exception Handling in Pandas .apply() function

Question

If I have a DataFrame:

myDF = DataFrame(data=[[11,11],[22,\'2A\'],[33,33]], columns = [\'A\',\'B\'])

Gives the following dataframe (Starting ou

Answer 1

much better/faster to do:

In [1]: myDF = DataFrame(data=[[11,11],[22,'2A'],[33,33]], columns = ['A','B'])

In [2]: myDF.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)
Out[2]: 
    A   B
0  11  11
1  22 NaN
2  33  33

[3 rows x 2 columns]

In [3]: myDF.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True).dtypes
Out[3]: 
A      int64
B    float64
dtype: object

This is a vectorized method of doing just this. The coerce flag say to mark as nan anything that cannot be converted to numeric.

You can of course do this to a single column if you'd like.