Pandas trim leading & trailing white space in a dataframe

Question

develop a function that Trims leading & trailing white space.

here is a simple sample, but real file contains far more complex rows and columns.

Answer 1

I think need check if values are strings, because mixed values in column - numeric with strings and for each string call strip:

df = df.applymap(lambda x: x.strip() if isinstance(x, str) else x)
print (df)
                     A    B     C
0                  A b    2   3.0
1                  NaN    2   3.0
2               random   43   4.0
3  any txt is possible  2 1  22.0
4                        23  99.0
5                 help   23   NaN

If columns have same dtypes, not get NaNs like in your sample for numeric values in column B:

cols = df.select_dtypes(['object']).columns
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(lambda x: x.str.strip())
print (df)
                     A    B     C
0                  A b  NaN   3.0
1                  NaN  NaN   3.0
2               random  NaN   4.0
3  any txt is possible  2 1  22.0
4                       NaN  99.0
5                 help  NaN   NaN