How to keep leading zeros in a column when reading CSV with Pandas?

As indicated in this answer by Lev Landau, there could be a simple solution to use converters option for a certain column in read_csv function.

converters={'column_name': str}

Let’s say I have csv file projects.csv like below:

project_name,project_id
Some Project,000245
Another Project,000478

As for example below code is trimming leading zeros:

from pandas import read_csv

dataframe = read_csv('projects.csv')
print dataframe

Result:

      project_name  project_id
0     Some Project         245
1  Another Project         478

Solution code example:

from pandas import read_csv

dataframe = read_csv('projects.csv', converters={'project_id': str})
print dataframe

Required result:

      project_name project_id
0     Some Project     000245
1  Another Project     000478

To have all columns as str:

pd.read_csv('sample.csv', dtype=str)

To have certain columns as str:

# column names which need to be string
lst_str_cols = ['prefix', 'serial']
dict_dtypes = {x: 'str' for x in lst_str_cols}
pd.read_csv('sample.csv', dtype=dict_dtypes)