UPDATE: you don’t need to convert your values afterwards, you can do it on-the-fly when reading your CSV:
In [165]: df=pd.read_csv(url, index_col=0, na_values=['(NA)']).fillna(0)
In [166]: df.dtypes
Out[166]:
GeoName object
ComponentName object
IndustryId int64
IndustryClassification object
Description object
2004 int64
2005 int64
2006 int64
2007 int64
2008 int64
2009 int64
2010 int64
2011 int64
2012 int64
2013 int64
2014 float64
dtype: object
If you need to convert multiple columns to numeric dtypes – use the following technique:
Sample source DF:
In [271]: df
Out[271]:
id a b c d e f
0 id_3 AAA 6 3 5 8 1
1 id_9 3 7 5 7 3 BBB
2 id_7 4 2 3 5 4 2
3 id_0 7 3 5 7 9 4
4 id_0 2 4 6 4 0 2
In [272]: df.dtypes
Out[272]:
id object
a object
b int64
c int64
d int64
e int64
f object
dtype: object
Converting selected columns to numeric dtypes:
In [273]: cols = df.columns.drop('id')
In [274]: df[cols] = df[cols].apply(pd.to_numeric, errors="coerce")
In [275]: df
Out[275]:
id a b c d e f
0 id_3 NaN 6 3 5 8 1.0
1 id_9 3.0 7 5 7 3 NaN
2 id_7 4.0 2 3 5 4 2.0
3 id_0 7.0 3 5 7 9 4.0
4 id_0 2.0 4 6 4 0 2.0
In [276]: df.dtypes
Out[276]:
id object
a float64
b int64
c int64
d int64
e int64
f float64
dtype: object
PS if you want to select all string (object) columns use the following simple trick:
cols = df.columns[df.dtypes.eq('object')]