Is there a way to trim/strip whitespace in multiple columns of a pandas dataframe?

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I have a pandas dataframe with 5 columns and 3 of those columns are string columns. I want to trim all the leading and trailing whitespaces in those 3 columns. Is there a way to achieve this in one go.

  ID    col_1  col_2    col_3   col_4
0  1      AA     XX      200     PP
1  2      BB     YY      300     QQ
2  3      CC     ZZ      500     RR

I want to trim 'col_1', 'col_2', 'col_4'

I know df['col_1'].str.strip() works on a individual column. But can i do all the columns at one go?

pandas dataframe python string
2 Answers

Use DataFrame.apply with list of columns:

cols = ['col_1', 'col_2', 'col_4']
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(lambda x: x.str.strip())

Or parse only object columns, it is obviously strings:

cols = df.select_dtypes(object).columns
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(lambda x: x.str.strip())
user_29010020 
df.columns = df.columns.str.strip()
user_66787950
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