[Python] Assign pandas dataframe column dtypes

I want to set the dtypes of multiple columns in pd.Dataframe (I have a file that I've had to manually parse into a list of lists, as the file was not amenable for pd.read_csv)

import pandas as pd
print pd.DataFrame([['a','1'],['b','2']],
dtype={'x':'object','y':'int'},
columns=['x','y'])


I get

ValueError: entry not a 2- or 3- tuple


The only way I can set them is by looping through each column variable and recasting with astype.

dtypes = {'x':'object','y':'int'}
mydata = pd.DataFrame([['a','1'],['b','2']],
columns=['x','y'])
for c in mydata.columns:
mydata[c] = mydata[c].astype(dtypes[c])
print mydata['y'].dtype #=> int64


Is there a better way?

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