Specify DataType using read_table() in Pandas
I believe we enabled in 0.12
you can pass str,np.str_,object in place of an S4
which all convert to object dtype in any event
or after you read it in
df['year'].astype(object)
I am loading a text file into pandas, and have a field that contains year.  I want to make sure that this field is a string when pulled into the dataframe.  
I can only seem to get this to work if I specify the exact length of the string using the code below:
df = pd.read_table('myfile.tsv', dtype={'year':'S4'})
Is there a way to do this without specifying length?  I will need to perform this action on different columns that vary in length.