pandas reading CSV data formatted with comma for thousands separator

Question

I am trying to create a dataframe in pandas using a CSV that is semicolon-delimited, and uses commas for the thousands separator on numeric data. Is there a way to read this in so that the type of the column is float and not string?

Answer 1

Pass param thousands=',' to read_csv to read those values as thousands:

In [27]:
import pandas as pd
import io

t="""id;value
0;123,123
1;221,323,330
2;32,001"""
pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(t), thousands=r',', sep=';')

Out[27]:
   id      value
0   0     123123
1   1  221323330
2   2      32001

Answer 2

Take a look at the read_csv documentation there is a keyword argument 'thousands' that you can pass the ',' into. Likewise if you had European data containing a '.' for the separator you could do the same.