Data Cleaning without pandas
I work in a restricted environment and I've heard of others that are worse than mine, but no pandas??? Geez, that's rough! 

You could do this by reading through the file, line-by-line, column by column and then applying a series of your own functions to test/fix the data in each cell. But you would have to have all of the defined needs well ahead of time and then write the methods to get each data point in a methodical fashion. 

So it can be done but you're doing a massive end-run around pandas to get there.