python - Pandas error TypeError: data type not understood -

i've been trying slice pandas dataframe using boolean indexing code like:

subset[subset.bl.str.contains("stoke city")] 

the column bl of object type.

yet when run it, have error:

typeerror: data type not understood

how go fixing it?

update:

i tried using:

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("stoke city")] 

but returned:

unicodeencodeerror: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xa3' in position 37: ordinal not in range(128)

i tried resolving that:

subset.bl = subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8") 

that worked, returned same error:

'data type not understood error'

when again tried:

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("stoke city")] 

you can try cast str astype, because object can else string:

subset[subset.bl.astype(str).str.contains("stoke city")] 

you can check type of first value by:

type(subset.ix[0, 'bl']) 

edit:

you can try:

subset[subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8").str.contains("stoke city")] 

or:

subset['bl'] = subset.bl.str.encode("utf-8") subset[subset.bl.str.contains("stoke city")]