How to change a string containing a dict in pandas?

January 9, 2023

ID	computed_data
0987	"{"Status":{"participate":14,"create":"10","activ":"0"},"rescount":22,"comcount":0,"partrate":0}"
4568	"{"Status":{"participate":49,"create":"40","activ":"27"},"rescount":22,"comcount":0,"partrate":73.47}"
1234	"{"Status":{"participate":3,"create":"3","activ":"1"},"comcount":0,"partrate":100,"rescount":42}"

I am trying to access and get the values in the computed_data column. It works on one cell when I am using eval().

eval(df["computed_data][0])

I tried a for loop to change all values at once and stored every dict in a list :

data = []
for x, i in enumerate(df["Computed Data"]):
    data.append(eval(df["Computed Data"][x]))

But I got an error "name "null" is not defined". I checked and I have no null values in my df which shape is 3601.

does anyone has an idea ? Thank you

>Solution :

Here is solution with custom function for convert not parseable strings to empty dictionaries:

import ast

def f(x):
    try:
        return ast.literal_eval(x)
    except ValueError:
        return {}
        
df["Computed Data"] = df[ "Computed Data"].str.strip('"').apply(f)