python - Convert whole dataframe from lower case to upper case with Pandas

Question

I have a dataframe like the one displayed below:

# Create an example dataframe about a fictional army
raw_data = {'regiment': ['Nighthawks', 'Nighthawks', 'Nighthawks', 'Nighthawks'],
            'company': ['1st', '1st', '2nd', '2nd'],
            'deaths': ['kkk', 52, '25', 616],
            'battles': [5, '42', 2, 2],
            'size': ['l', 'll', 'l', 'm']}
df = pd.DataFrame(raw_data, columns = ['regiment', 'company', 'deaths', 'battles', 'size'])

My goal is to transform every single string inside of the dataframe to upper case so that it looks like this:

Notice: all data types are objects and must not be changed; the output must contain all objects. I want to avoid to convert every single column one by one... I would like to do it generally over the whole dataframe possibly.

What I tried so far is to do this but without success

df.str.upper()

Answer 1

astype() will cast each series to the dtype object (string) and then call the str() method on the converted series to get the string literally and call the function upper() on it. Note that after this, the dtype of all columns changes to object.

In [17]: df
Out[17]: 
     regiment company deaths battles size
0  Nighthawks     1st    kkk       5    l
1  Nighthawks     1st     52      42   ll
2  Nighthawks     2nd     25       2    l
3  Nighthawks     2nd    616       2    m

In [18]: df.apply(lambda x: x.astype(str).str.upper())
Out[18]: 
     regiment company deaths battles size
0  NIGHTHAWKS     1ST    KKK       5    L
1  NIGHTHAWKS     1ST     52      42   LL
2  NIGHTHAWKS     2ND     25       2    L
3  NIGHTHAWKS     2ND    616       2    M

You can later convert the 'battles' column to numeric again, using to_numeric():

In [42]: df2 = df.apply(lambda x: x.astype(str).str.upper())

In [43]: df2['battles'] = pd.to_numeric(df2['battles'])

In [44]: df2
Out[44]: 
     regiment company deaths  battles size
0  NIGHTHAWKS     1ST    KKK        5    L
1  NIGHTHAWKS     1ST     52       42   LL
2  NIGHTHAWKS     2ND     25        2    L
3  NIGHTHAWKS     2ND    616        2    M

In [45]: df2.dtypes
Out[45]: 
regiment    object
company     object
deaths      object
battles      int64
size        object
dtype: object