I am trying to remove commas from number which has been entered as a string and change it’s data type to integer for analysis purposes

0      1,741,147
1          1,755
2         95,532
3        216,022
4        208,134

Above is the Pandas series(‘Active Cases’) that I am working with whose data type is Object. I want to remove the commas and change the data type to int64. I have tried doing it in the following way but it is not working:

df['Active Cases'].replace(',','')
df['Active Cases'].astype(np.int64)

>Solution :

The operation is not inplace, you need assign the result back

df['Active Cases'] = df['Active Cases'].replace(',','').astype(np.int64)

If you want to make the replace more robust, like also replace possible spaces after comma, you can do Series.str.replace

df['Active Cases'] = df['Active Cases'].str.replace(', *', '', regex=True).astype(np.int64)

I would recommend do pd.to_numeric instead to avoid possible error

df['Active Cases'] = pd.to_numeric(df['Active Cases'].str.replace(', *', '', regex=True), errors='coerce')