How to efficiently handle European decimal separators using the pandas read_csv function?

For European style numbers, use the thousands and decimal parameters in pandas.read_csv.

For example:

pandas.read_csv('data.csv', thousands=".", decimal=",")

From the docs:

thousands :

str, optional Thousands separator.

decimal :

str, default ‘.’ Character to recognize as decimal point
(e.g. use ‘,’ for European data).