Description
Pandas version checks
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I have checked that this issue has not already been reported.
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I have confirmed this bug exists on the latest version of pandas.
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I have confirmed this bug exists on the main branch of pandas.
Reproducible Example
import pandas as pd
double_cats = pd.Series([1.2, 2.3, 3.9, 4.1, 5.5], dtype="category")
explicit_dtype = pd.CategoricalDtype(
categories=double_cats.dtype.categories.astype("string").astype("object"),
)
all_nans = double_cats.astype(explicit_dtype)
assert all(all_nans.isna())
Issue Description
I need to convert a category
dtype's float
categories to be string
categories with the object
dtype. So turn pd.Series([1.2, 2.3, 3.9, 4.1, 5.5], dtype="category")
into pd.Series(['1.2', '2.3', '3.9', '4.1', '5.5'], dtype="object")
.
Other than multiple chained astype
calls to first convert the data to be string
and then object
and then category
again, the best way I found to change the dtype of a category
dtype's categories
is to set it directly on a new pd.CategoricalDtype
object and then call astype
once. But it turns out doing that nullifies all the values of my data, so I'm stuck with the chained astype
calls for now, which I assume is slower.
It seems pretty clear that the result of the above snippet should not be to nullify all values, so this ticket is to track a fix for that bug, but I'd also be open towards any other workarounds in the mean time. Thanks!
Expected Behavior
The behavior should match that of chained astype
calls directly on the data:
import pandas as pd
double_cats = pd.Series([1.2, 2.3, 3.9, 4.1, 5.5], dtype="category")
no_nans = double_cats.astype("string").astype("object").astype("category")
assert not any(no_nans.isna())
The result should be the same as if we started with string categories
double_cats = pd.Series(['1.2', '2.3', '3.9', '4.1', '5.5'], dtype="category")
explicit_dtype = pd.CategoricalDtype(
categories=double_cats.dtype.categories.astype("object"),
)
result = double_cats.astype(explicit_dtype)
Installed Versions
INSTALLED VERSIONS
commit : 2e218d1
python : 3.8.2.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Darwin
OS-release : 21.6.0
Version : Darwin Kernel Version 21.6.0: Wed Aug 10 14:25:27 PDT 2022; root:xnu-8020.141.5~2/RELEASE_X86_64
machine : x86_64
processor : i386
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : en_US.UTF-8
LOCALE : en_US.UTF-8
pandas : 1.5.3
numpy : 1.22.4
pytz : 2022.2.1
dateutil : 2.8.2
setuptools : 59.8.0
pip : 22.2.2
Cython : 0.29.32
pytest : 7.1.2
hypothesis : None
sphinx : 4.5.0
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : 4.9.1
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : 3.1.2
IPython : 8.5.0
pandas_datareader: None
bs4 : 4.11.1
bottleneck : None
brotli : None
fastparquet : None
fsspec : 2022.8.2
gcsfs : None
matplotlib : 3.5.3
numba : 0.56.2
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : None
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : None
pyreadstat : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : 1.8.1
snappy : None
sqlalchemy : None
tables : None
tabulate : None
xarray : None
xlrd : None
xlwt : None
zstandard : None
tzdata : None