how to convert entire dataframe values to float in pandas

Question

My question is similar to this one.

I want to convert all the values in the dataframe to float type. But what is need more is to ignore the rows where such conversions cannot happen.

For example, given a string '0.9', it will be converted to float successfully but a string like 'why' will through an error. I want to remove all such rows in the dataframe which would come under the error case.

Answer 1

Try this:

df = df.apply(pd.to_numeric, errors='coerce')

From docs :

errors : {'ignore', 'raise', 'coerce'}, default 'raise'

If 'raise' , then invalid parsing will raise an exception

If 'coerce' , then invalid parsing will be set as NaN

If 'ignore' , then invalid parsing will return the input