Edit Type Of Column To Fixed Width String (within Existing Pandas Dataframe)

I have a column of string objects in a pandas dataframe. I'd like to change them to the a less outrageously inefficient fixed width string type. There are many SO answers (How to

Solution 1:

You can pop the column before re-assignment:

In [11]: df.dtypes
Out[11]:
c    object
dtype: object

In [12]: df['c'] = df.pop('c').astype('|S2')

In [13]: df.dtypes
Out[13]:
c    |S2
dtype: object