title: Issues with try/except, attempting to convert strings to integers in pandas data frame where possible
body: <p>I made a function to clean up any HTML code/tags from strings in my dataframe. The function takes every value from the data frame, cleans it with the remove_html function, and returns a clean df. After converting the data frame to string values and cleaning it up I'm attempting to convert where possible the values in the data frame back to integers. I have tried try/except but don't get the result that I want. This is what I have at the moment:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def clean_df(df):
      df = df.astype(str)
      list_of_columns = list(df.columns)
      for col in list_of_columns:
          column = []
          for row in list(df[col]):
              column.append(remove_html(row))
              try:
                  return int(row)
              except ValueError:
                  pass
  
          del df[col]
  
          df[col] = column
  
      return df
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Without the try/except statements the function returns a clean df where the integers are strings. So its just the try/except statement that seems to be an issue. I've tried the try/except statements in multiple ways and none of them return a df. The current code for example returns an 'int' object.</p>