1

Say I've got a column in my Pandas Dataframe that looks like this:

s = pd.Series(["ab-cd.", "abc", "abc-def/", "ab.cde", "abcd-"])

I would like to use this column for fuzzy matching and therefore I want to remove characters ('.' , '/' , '-') but only at the end of each string so it looks like this:

s = pd.Series(["ab-cd", "abc", "abc-def", "ab.cde", "abcd"])

So far I started out easy so instead of generating a list with characters I want removed I just repeated commands for different characters like:

if s.str[-1] == '.':
  s.str[-1].replace('.', '')

But this simply produces an error. How do I get the result I want, that is strings without characters at the end (characters in the rest of the string need to be preserved)?

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
4

Replace with regex will help you get the output 

s.replace(r'[./-]$','',regex=True)

or with the help of apply incase looking for an alternative 

s.apply(lambda x :x[:-1] if x[-1] is '.' or '-' or '/' else x) 

0      ab-cd
1        abc
2    abc-def
3     ab.cde
4       abcd
dtype: object
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Glad to help @MichielV. . If my answer was helpful, don't forget accept it - click on the check mark (✓) beside the answer to toggle it from greyed out to filled in. Happy learning.
0

You can use str.replace with a regex: 

>>> s = pd.Series(["ab-cd.", "abc", "abc-def/", "ab.cde", "abcd-"])
>>> s.str.replace("\.$|/$|\-$","")
0      ab-cd
1        abc
2    abc-def
3     ab.cde
4       abcd
dtype: object
>>>

which can be reduced to this: 

>>> s.str.replace("[./-]$","")
0      ab-cd
1        abc
2    abc-def
3     ab.cde
4       abcd
dtype: object
>>>
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Many thanks to you MedAli, I can now continue my project!
0

You can use str.replace with a regular expression

s.str.replace(r'[./-]$','')

Substitute inside [./-] any characters you want to replace. $ means the match should be at the end of the string.

To replace "in-place" use Series.replace

s.replace(r'[./-]$','', inplace=True, regex=True)
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Thank you for your quick reply, this solved my problem right away!
0

I was able to remove characters from the end of strings in a column in a pandas DataFrame with the following line of code:

s.replace(r'[./-]$','',regex=True)

Where all entries in between brackets ( [./-] ) indicate characters to be removed and $ indicate they should be removed from the end

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