how can replace underscore with minus sign in an entire column?

Question

the picture below is my list where i want to edit two cloumns for future analysis in data cleaning process:

"start_lng" and "end_lng" columns' content are dtype('O') while running the code Bike_share_data["start_lng"].dtypes

Now i want to replace underscore (_) with the minus sign (-) and make the entire column dtypes as float.

i have tested a code separately as given below:

import pandas as pd
d =[ '_1.0', '_2.0', '_3.0']

d=[s.replace('_','-') for s in d]
print(d)

the result is ['-1.0', '-2.0', '-3.0'].

but unable to implement it on Bike_share_data["start_lng"] column. how can i do that?

Answer 1

You can use the str.replace() method to perform the replacement and then use astype() to change the data type.

# sample DataFrame with a "start_lng" column containing strings
data = {'start_lng': ['_1.0', '_2.0', '_3.0']}
Bike_share_data = pd.DataFrame(data)

# Replace underscores with minus signs & convert the column to float
Bike_share_data["start_lng"] = Bike_share_data["start_lng"].str.replace('_', '-').astype(float)