Removing characters from a string in pandas

Question

I have a similar question to this one: Pandas DataFrame: remove unwanted parts from strings in a column.

So I used:

temp_dataframe[\'PPI\'] = temp_d         


        

Answer 1

use vectorised str.lstrip:

temp_dataframe['PPI'] = temp_dataframe['PPI'].str.lstrip('PPI/')

it looks like you may have missing values so you should mask those out or replace them:

temp_dataframe['PPI'].fillna('', inplace=True)

or

temp_dataframe.loc[temp_dataframe['PPI'].notnull(), 'PPI'] = temp_dataframe['PPI'].str.lstrip('PPI/')

maybe a better method is to filter using str.startswith and use split and access the string after the prefix you want to remove:

temp_dataframe.loc[temp_dataframe['PPI'].str.startswith('PPI/'), 'PPI'] = temp_dataframe['PPI'].str.split('PPI/').str[1]

As @JonClements pointed out that lstrip is removing whitespace rather than removing the prefix which is what you're after.

update

Another method is to pass a regex pattern that looks for the optionally prefix and extract all characters after the prefix:

temp_dataframe['PPI'].str.extract('(?:PPI/)?(.*)', expand=False)