title: Pandas convert object column to str - column contains unicode, float etc
body: <p>I have pandas data frame where column type shows as <code>object</code> but when I try to convert to string, </p>
  
  <p><code>df['column'] = df['column'].astype('str')</code></p>
  
  <p><code>UnicodeEncodeError</code> get thrown: 
  <code>*** UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode characters in position 0-5: ordinal not in range(128)</code></p>
  
  <p>My next approach was to handle the encoding part:
  <code>df['column'] = filtered_df['column'].apply(lambda x: x.encode('utf-8').strip())</code></p>
  
  <p>But that gives following error: 
  <code>*** AttributeError: 'float' object has no attribute 'encode'</code></p>
  
  <p>Whats the best approach to convert this column to string.</p>
  
  <p>Sample of string in the column</p>
  
  <pre><code>Thank you :)
  Thank You !!!
  responsibilities/assigned job.
  </code></pre>