How do I change the special characters to the usual alphabet letters? This is my dataframe:
In [56]: cities
Out[56]:
Table Code Country Year City Value
240 Åland Islands 2014.0 MARIEHAMN 11437.0 1
240 Åland Islands 2010.0 MARIEHAMN 5829.5 1
240 Albania 2011.0 Durrës 113249.0
240 Albania 2011.0 TIRANA 418495.0
240 Albania 2011.0 Durrës 56511.0
I want it to look like this:
In [56]: cities
Out[56]:
Table Code Country Year City Value
240 Aland Islands 2014.0 MARIEHAMN 11437.0 1
240 Aland Islands 2010.0 MARIEHAMN 5829.5 1
240 Albania 2011.0 Durres 113249.0
240 Albania 2011.0 TIRANA 418495.0
240 Albania 2011.0 Durres 56511.0
The pandas method is to use the vectorised str.normalize combined with str.decode and str.encode:
In [60]:
df['Country'].str.normalize('NFKD').str.encode('ascii', errors='ignore').str.decode('utf-8')
Out[60]:
0 Aland Islands
1 Aland Islands
2 Albania
3 Albania
4 Albania
Name: Country, dtype: object
So to do this for all str dtypes:
In [64]:
cols = df.select_dtypes(include=[np.object]).columns
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(lambda x: x.str.normalize('NFKD').str.encode('ascii', errors='ignore').str.decode('utf-8'))
df
Out[64]:
Table Code Country Year City Value
0 240 Aland Islands 2014.0 MARIEHAMN 11437.0 1
1 240 Aland Islands 2010.0 MARIEHAMN 5829.5 1
2 240 Albania 2011.0 Durres 113249.0
3 240 Albania 2011.0 TIRANA 418495.0
4 240 Albania 2011.0 Durres 56511.0