Convert multiple columns to string in pandas dataframe

I know this is an old question, but I was looking for a way to turn all columns with an object dtype to strings as a workaround for a bug I discovered in rpy2. I'm working with large dataframes, so didn't want to list each column explicitly. This seemed to work well for me so I thought I'd share in case it helps someone else.

stringcols = df.select_dtypes(include='object').columns
df[stringcols] = df[stringcols].fillna('').astype(str)

The "fillna('')" prevents NaN entries from getting converted to the string 'nan' by replacing with an empty string instead.

To convert multiple columns to string, include a list of columns to your above-mentioned command:

df[['one', 'two', 'three']] = df[['one', 'two', 'three']].astype(str)
# add as many column names as you like.

That means that one way to convert all columns is to construct the list of columns like this:

all_columns = list(df) # Creates list of all column headers
df[all_columns] = df[all_columns].astype(str)

Note that the latter can also be done directly (see comments).