(Python) astype(int) cannot remove leading zeros from object

Question

and Happy new year!

Currently I'm dealing with a dataframe column as followed, with focus on the ACCOUNT_NUMBER column (type 'object'):

  BRANCH_CODE ACCOUNT_NUMBER  ACCOUNT_HEAD SCHEDULE_DUE_DATE  \
        1    00001838002     211102000               NaT   
        1    00001867003     211102000               NaT   
        1    00001962020     211102000               NaT   
        1    030MZAX9082     211102000               NaT   
        1    00002404079     211102000               NaT   
        1    00010322002     211102000               NaT   
        1    00021070011     211102000               NaT   
        1    091QWEV34QA     211102000               NaT   
        1    00024605002     211102000               NaT   
        1    214QSVC45AX     211102000               NaT 

As you can see, some values in ACCOUNT_NUMBER are exclusively numbers, and some are a mixture of numbers and letters. My objective is to convert values that are exclusively numbers from 'object' to 'int', and keep the values that are mixture of numbers and letters as 'object' (ignore). To that end, I'm trying this code line:

file_consol['ACCOUNT_NUMBER']=file_consol['ACCOUNT_NUMBER'].astype(int,errors='ignore')

However, the code line fails to convert the numbers into int. I have tried another alternative below, but it also doesn't work:

file_consol_P['ACCOUNT_NUMBER']=file_consol_P['ACCOUNT_NUMBER'].astype(str).astype(int,errors='ignore')

Any help or explanation on this is greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Answer 1

Try with apply:

file_consol['ACCOUNT_NUMBER']=file_consol['ACCOUNT_NUMBER'].apply(lambda x: int(x) if all(k.isdigit() for k in x) else x)

Output:

0        1838002
1        1867003
2        1962020
3    030MZAX9082
4        2404079
5       10322002
6       21070011
7    091QWEV34QA
8       24605002
9    214QSVC45AX