Editing Strings in a Pandas Dataframe

Question

I have a pandas dataframe like the following:

Date   Title 
Jan 1  Washington Running
Jan 2  Jefferson City Cycling
Jan 3  Springfield Running
...

How can I remove the word "Running" or "Cycling" from all of the titles? I would like to get:

Date   Title 
Jan 1  Washington
Jan 2  Jefferson City
Jan 3  Springfield
...

noah · Accepted Answer · 2020-11-18 00:39:14Z

2

You'll want to use pandas's string modifiers. Here are the docs for pandas.Series.str.replace(). It is slightly faster than the normal replace.

Mechanical_meat's great one line approach works with .str.replace() also:

df['Title'].str.replace(r'(\bRunning\b|\bCycling\b)','',regex=True)

I thought I'd offer the alternative of using df['Title'].str.replace('Running','') and df['Title'].str.replace('Cycling',''). Why do it in two steps? It avoids regex which can be "costly". Running a timeit on the two for small dataframes though finds the overhead of running replace twice is significantly higher than the cost of regex. I'd imagine it only gets worse for larger dataframes.

edited Nov 18, 2020 at 0:39

answered Nov 18, 2020 at 0:31

noah

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