title: converting currency with $ to numbers in Python pandas
body: <p>I have the following data in pandas dataframe:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    state        1st        2nd             3rd
  0   California  $11,593,820 $109,264,246    $8,496,273
  1   New York    $10,861,680 $45,336,041     $6,317,300
  2   Florida     $7,942,848  $69,369,589     $4,697,244
  3   Texas       $7,536,817  $61,830,712     $5,736,941
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I want to perform some simple analysis (e.g., sum, groupby) with three columns (1st, 2nd, 3rd), but the data type of those three columns is object (or string).</p>
  
  <p>So I used the following code for data conversion:</p>
  
  <pre><code>data = data.convert_objects(convert_numeric=True)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But, conversion does not work, perhaps, due to the dollar sign. Any suggestion?</p>