convert data

I wonder if you have the code for converting the string data into numbers for downloading the historical data, the income statement, balance sheet & cash flow statement.  This data downloads as strings (text) instead of numbers.  There is a little button in the dowloaded data that will make the conversion.  I wonder if you could give me the code for that.  I am trying to do this in Jupyter notebook.  I'm not very good with code yet.  I've spent several hours trying to make a function that will do this in Python but so far I can't get it right.  I want to be able to download the data directly into the notebook and convert it there rather than taking an extra step to do it before I import it into Jupyter.  If you could give me the code needed to do that it would help.  Thank you.