How to set a cell to NaN in a pandas dataframe
I'd like to replace bad values in a column of a dataframe by NaN's.
mydata = {'x' : [10, 50, 18, 32, 47, 20], 'y' : ['12', '11', 'N/A', '13', '15', 'N/A']}
df = pd.DataFrame(mydata)
df[df.y == 'N/A']['y'] = np.nan
Though, the last line fails and throws a warning because it's working on a copy of df. So, what's the correct way to handle this? I've seen many solutions with iloc or ix but here, I need to use a boolean condition.
Answer
just use replace:
In [106]:
df.replace('N/A',np.NaN)
Out[106]:
x y
0 10 12
1 50 11
2 18 NaN
3 32 13
4 47 15
5 20 NaN
What you're trying is called chain indexing: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/indexing.html#indexing-view-versus-copy
You can use loc to ensure you operate on the original dF:
In [108]:
df.loc[df['y'] == 'N/A','y'] = np.nan
df
Out[108]:
x y
0 10 12
1 50 11
2 18 NaN
3 32 13
4 47 15
5 20 NaN