Python: Convert dataframe into a list with string items inside list

It worked for me without .values():

list = df[col_name].astype(str).tolist()

You can just cast the column dtype using astype(str) and then convert to list using .values.tolist(), this returns a numpy array using .values which has a member function to convert this to a list:

In [321]:
us_zips['zipcode'].astype(str).values.tolist()

Out[321]:
['10601', '60047', '50301', '10606']