Combine two columns of text in pandas dataframe

Question

I have a 20 x 4000 dataframe in Python using pandas. Two of these columns are named Year and quarter. I\'d like to create a variable called p

Answer 1

Although the @silvado answer is good if you change df.map(str) to df.astype(str) it will be faster:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'Year': ['2014', '2015'], 'quarter': ['q1', 'q2']})

In [131]: %timeit df["Year"].map(str)
10000 loops, best of 3: 132 us per loop

In [132]: %timeit df["Year"].astype(str)
10000 loops, best of 3: 82.2 us per loop