Changes not sticking

I have a column (Col C) filled with some values randomly and so for the cells with missing (blank) data I want to fill them with NAN. My line of code should do that but instead it wipes out the whole column with blanks. What am I doing wrong?

df[‘COL C’] = df[‘COL C’].replace(‘’, np.nan, inplace = True)

The .replace method can work in 2 ways:

  1. Return the new, changed, dataframe.

  2. Do the change in-place and return None.

You’re doing the change in-place and then storing the returned result (None) back into the dataframe.

You should do either:

df['COL C'] = df['COL C'].replace('', np.nan)

or:

df['COL C'].replace('', np.nan, inplace=True)
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