How to format string without leading zeros and + - as integer in python pandas?

Question

I have rows in a column with strings in a pandas dataframe that look like this:

+0094
-0082

How would I replace all the values in the column so that they would be formatted like this:

 94
-82

Maurice Pasternak · Answer

pandas is smart enough to figure it out with a dataframe's astype method.

So your approach would be:

df['col of interest'] = df['col of interest'].astype(int)

ThePyGuy · Answer

I'd suggest to use pd.to_numeric as it provides more flexibility over .astype :

df['col'] = pd.to_numeric(df['col'])