How to replace substrings in a Dataframe column, but only at the start of the strings?

Question

I'm trying to replace specific characters in a data frame just if the string of the column starts with the characters specified. I mean, the df is as below:

UBICACION	NAME
AL03	Joe
FL03	Maria
AL07	Karla
DAL5	Marco

The desired output would be:

UBICACION	NAME
FL03	Joe
FL03	Maria
FL07	Karla
DAL5	Marco

This is my try:

df['UBICACION'] = df['UBICACION'].replace ("FL","AL")

The last sentence is not working, cause' it changes all the word, it just keeps the specified characters

Hope you can help me, I'm a little bit new on this. Best regards.

I edited the title of the question to reflect the question you appear to be actually asking. Please feel free to re-correct it if I got it wrong. — Karl Knechtel
– Karl Knechtel, Commented Aug 5, 2021 at 1:29

tdy · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-05 01:54:53Z

5

DataFrame.replace includes a regex=True option, so you can use ^AL:

df['UBICACION'] = df['UBICACION'].replace('^AL', 'FL', regex=True)


#   UBICACION   NAME
# 0 FL03        Joe
# 1 FL03        Maria
# 2 FL07        Karla
# 3 DAL5        Marco

edited Aug 5, 2021 at 1:54

answered Aug 5, 2021 at 1:34

tdy

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3 Comments

Xkid Over a year ago

WOW it really worked, just a quick question, why does '^' is used for?

tdy Over a year ago

when ^ is at the beginning of a regex, it's a special regex character that means "beginning of the line"

tdy Over a year ago

here's a decent summary of other special characters in regular expressions

leminhnguyen · Accepted Answer · 2021-08-05 01:35:04Z

0

try this:

df["UBICACION"] = df["UBICACION"].apply(lambda x: f"FL{x[2:]}" if x.startswith("AL") else x)

answered Aug 5, 2021 at 1:35

leminhnguyen

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