Remove non-printing characters from a Pandas dataframe

nonprint-char_remover.py

def remove_non_printing_chars(df):
    """Clean a dataframe column to remove any non-printing characters.
    We've encountered values like tabs in some of the data.

    :param df: Pandas dataframe
    :return: Pandas dataframe
    """
    clean_df = df.copy(deep=True)
    clean_df = clean_df.apply(lambda x: x.str.strip() if x.dtype == "object" else x)
    for col in list(clean_df.columns):
        clean_df.replace({col: r'\x7f\x80.$'}, {col: ''}, regex=True, inplace=True)
        clean_df.replace({col: ' '}, {col: ''}, regex=False, inplace=True)
        clean_df[col].replace('', np.nan, inplace=True)
    return clean_df