I am working with a dataset that contains lots of missing values. However, when a value is missed it is not represented as NaN but as “–”. In order to find how many missing values there are in an specific column I cannot use typical Pandas functions. Henceforth, I have worked it out by count the number of appereances of this character in the column and substract it to the total number of entries in the column:

nan = data['column_name'].loc[data['column_name'] == '--']
non_missing = len(data['column_name']) - len(nan)