pandas dtype conversion from object to string
pandas, python
Solution
All strings are represented as variable-length (which is what `object` dtype is holding). You can do `series.astype('S32')` if you want; but it will be recast if you then store it in a DataFrame or do much with it. This is for simplicity.
Certain serialization formats, e.g. `HDFStore` stores the strings as fixed-length strings on disk though.
You can `series.astype(int32)` if you would like and it will store as the new type.
Problem
I have a csv file that has a few columns which are numbers and few that are string. When I try `myDF.dtypes` it shows me all the string columns as `object`. Someone asked a related question before here about why this is done. Is it possible to recast the `dtype` from object to string? Also, in general, is there any easy way to recast the `dtype` from `int64` and `float64` to `int32` and `float32` and save on the size of the data (in memory / on disk)?