reading dataframes through panda printing types From http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/io.html
In [7]: data = 'a,b,c\n1,2,3\n4,5,6\n7,8,9'
In [8]: print(data)
a,b,c
1,2,3
4,5,6
7,8,9
In [9]: df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(data), dtype=object)
In [10]: df
Out[10]:
a b c
0 1 2 3
1 4 5 6
2 7 8 9
In [11]: df['a'][0]
Out[11]: '1'
In [12]: df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(data), dtype={'b': object, 'c': np.float64})
In [13]: df.dtypes
Out[13]:
a int64
b object
c float64
dtype: object