No way to force read numerics as string in `read_html `

[adamist521]

When HTML table shows 01 in cell, read_html reads it and interpret it as float and removes 0 of 01 .
Options to read them as string?

[sinhrks]

Thanks. Nice to add dtypes like read_csv. I just saw a little, but it looks to be achieved by passing dtype to TextParser -> TextFileReader.

PR is welcome:)

[stevenmanton]

Just stumbled across this page with the same issue. @gte620v can you explain how to accomplish the raw html parsing given your PR? Thanks!

[gte620v]

Should be something like this: https://github.com/gte620v/pandas/blob/5cb8243f2dd31cc2155627f29cfc89bbf6d4b84b/pandas/io/tests/test_html.py#L715

Just use a converter to convert to str.

@stevenmanton ^

[stevenmanton]

@gte620v thanks for the info. It sounds like you can easily convert back to string, but can't prevent the automatic parsing in the first place. For example, keeping the leading zeros in an integer. Thanks again!