Pandas error TypeError: data type not understood

Question

I've been trying to slice a pandas dataframe using boolean indexing code like:

subset[subset.bl.str.contains("Stoke City")]

The column bl is of 'object' dtype.

Yet when I run it, I get an error: TypeError: data type not understood

How do I fix this?

UPDATE:

I tried using:

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("Stoke City")]

But that gave: UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\\xa3' in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)

I then tried fixing that with:

subset.bl = subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8")

That seemed to work, but I got the same error: 'data type not understood error'

when I again tried:

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("Stoke City")]

Answer 1

You can try cast to str by astype , because object can be something else as string :

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("Stoke City")]

You can check type of first value by:

type(subset.ix[0, 'bl'])

EDIT:

You can try:

subset[subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8").str.contains("Stoke City")]

Or:

subset['bl'] = subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8")
subset[subset.bl.str.contains("Stoke City")]