USING LIKE inside pandas.query()

Question

I have been using Pandas for more than 3 months and I have an fair idea about the dataframes accessing and querying etc.

I have got an requirement wherein I wanted t

Answer 1

Not using query(), but this will give you what you're looking for:

df[df.col_name.str.startswith('abc')]


df
Out[93]: 
  col_name
0     this
1     that
2     abcd

df[df.col_name.str.startswith('abc')]
Out[94]: 
  col_name
2     abcd

Query uses the pandas eval() and is limited in what you can use within it. If you want to use pure SQL you could consider pandasql where the following statement would work for you:

sqldf("select col_name from df where col_name like 'abc%';", locals())

Or alternately if your problem with the pandas str methods was that your column wasn't entirely of string type you could do the following:

df[df.col_name.str.startswith('abc').fillna(False)]