I am at a complete loss over this. I’m reading in a horrible Excel file with pandas using the following line:

pd_df = pd.read_excel(file_path, sheet_name=sheet, header=10, skipfooter=7, dtype='string', na_filter=False)

For one sheet, pandas apparently replaces/fills all empty cells with 0 – where “empty” means either really empty or containing two spaces. For another sheet, where blank cells are filled with at least five spaces, no replacement happens. Does anyone have any experience with that? It seems so random that this happens with exactly the same code.