Ignoring symbols and select only numerical values with pandas

Question

In one field I have entries like 'U$ 192,0'. Working on pandas, how I ignore non numerical data and get only the numerical part?

Answer 1

Use str.strip if the prefix is fixed or str.replace if not:

data = pandas.Series(["U$ 192.0"])
data.str.replace('^[^\d]*', '').astype(float)

This removes all the non-numeric characters to the left of the number, and casts to float.