Replace string/value in entire DataFrame

Considering data is your pandas DataFrame you can also use:

data.replace({'very bad': 1, 'bad': 2, 'poor': 3, 'good': 4, 'very good': 5}, inplace=True)

Use replace

In [126]: df.replace(['very bad', 'bad', 'poor', 'good', 'very good'], 
                     [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]) 
Out[126]: 
      resp  A  B  C
   0     1  3  3  4
   1     2  4  3  4
   2     3  5  5  5
   3     4  2  3  2
   4     5  1  1  1
   5     6  3  4  1
   6     7  4  4  4
   7     8  5  5  5
   8     9  2  2  1
   9    10  1  1  1

data = data.replace(['very bad', 'bad', 'poor', 'good', 'very good'], [1, 2, 3, 4, 5])

You must state where the result should be saved. If you say only data.replace(...) it is only shown as a change in preview, not in the envirable itself.