title: str.replace not working on my series - but works well on example
body: <p>In my dataframe, I have a variable that should be a number, but is currently recognized as a string, with space after the thousand's value, for example : "5 948.5" </p>
  
  <p>Before I can convert it to a float, I need to remove that space</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>d = {'col1': [1,2], 'numbers': [' 4 856.4','5 000.5']}
  data = pd.DataFrame(data=d)
  
  data['numbers']=data['numbers'].str.replace(" ", "")
  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This works perfectly. </p>
  
  <p>But when I do the exact same thing to my series, nothing happens (no error message, but the spaces remain). Other manipulations to that series work normally.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea of what I can try to understand and fix the problem on my series? 
  Thanks!</p>
  
  <p>Edit: 
  I ve loaded the data with a </p>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>pd.read_csv(file.csv, encoding = "ISO-8859-1")
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>could that be responsible for the unmovable spaces?  If I did not do that, I'd have an error message when loading "UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't decode byte 0xe8 in position 2: invalid continuation byte"
  I have tried to call read_csv with encoding='latin1', and encoding='cp1252' - the problem remains.</p>
  
  <p>Edit 1.b. it seems to be an issue with the encoding of the space (Thanks @Marat). I downloaded an excel version of the data, and tried to replace all spaces of that column by nothing. It did not work. Removing a few spaces manually did work (but the file is too large to do it this way)</p>
  
  <p>Edit 2: sample data. It really looks like the example I gave above, that works..but it really doesnt. I know nobody can reproduce this on their computer, I am not asking for the solution, but rather for ideas of what could be wrong... </p>
  
  <p>As requested: here is a copytoclipboard of my data:</p>
  
  <pre class="lang-py prettyprint-override"><code>GroupeRA,SecteurMA,StatutMA,TypeMA,fields_ancienMatricule,historizedFields_denomination,Annee,region,fields_codeComiteSubregional,arrondissement,fields_ins,adresse_commune,perequation
  
  Crèches,MASS,Collectif,CREC,632100101,Le Bocage I,2017,RBC,BX,Bruxelles-capitale,21001,Anderlecht,"0,00 "
  Crèches,MASS,Collectif,CREC,632100101,Le Bocage I,2018,RBC,BX,Bruxelles-capitale,21001,Anderlecht,"0,00 "
  Crèches,MASS,Collectif,CREC,x,Le xyzI,2018,RBC,BX,Bruxelles-capitale,21001,Anderlecht,"1 302,26 "
  Crèches,MASS,Collectif,CREC,632100101,Le Bocage I,2018,RBC,BX,Bruxelles-capitale,21001,Anderlecht,"687,56 "
  Crèches,MASS,Collectif,CREC,632100101,xyz,2019,RBC,BX,Bruxelles-capitale,21001,Anderlecht,"1 372,91 "
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Edit 3: the data is in csv (though as mentioned in edit 1.b I also got the data in xls and have the same issue (even when opening in xls directly, cannot "find&amp;replace all" to find the spaces, as if excel did not read them as such) 
  I used DB vizualizer to extract the data from our database. </p>