How to translate "bytes" objects into literal strings in pandas Dataframe, Python3.x?

You can use vectorised str.decode to decode byte strings into ordinary strings:

df['COLUMN1'].str.decode("utf-8")

To do this for multiple columns you can select just the str columns:

str_df = df.select_dtypes([np.object])

convert all of them:

str_df = str_df.stack().str.decode('utf-8').unstack()

You can then swap out converted cols with the original df cols:

for col in str_df:
    df[col] = str_df[col]

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