Pandas Split Function in Reverse

Question

I have a Pandas Dataframe with a column that looks like this:

    Car_Make
0   2017 Abarth 124 Spider ManualConvertible
1   2017 Abarth 124 Spider AutoConver         


        

Answer 1

Here's a shot at your three questions:

1) Why does df['Car_Make'].apply(lambda x:pd.Series(x.split()[::-1])) work?

Break it down:

1. df['Car_Make'] - the column with the data you want to operate on
2. .apply() - a pandas DataFrame and Series method that will apply a function to either every column, or every row, in a DataFrame, or to every row in a Series.
3. lambda x: - the function that will be applied by the .apply() method to every row of the Series. x represents the record object, which in your case is the string containing the Car_Make entries.
4. pd.Series() - this will convert the value inside it into a pandas Series.
5. x.split() - As mentioned in point 3, x is your string object, and split() is a string method that, when passed with no parameters, defaults to splitting a string by its spaces and returning each split object into a list.
6. [::-1] - A handy list iterator that reverses a list, such as that returned by x.split(). The syntax for list iteration is [start_index:end_index:step]. Using a -1 step iterates through the list backwards.

Put that all together, and that code is iterating through every record in df['Car_Make'], splitting them, reversing the order of the split items, and returning the reversed list as a pandas Series object.

2) Replicating that with a defined function.

You are really close, only that the function needs to take a row/record as its argument, and needs to be called in the .apply() method. What you want to do is replace the lambda x, not the way it is applied.

Using what you have so far:

def f(x):
    return pd.Series(x.split()[::-1])

df['Car_Make'].apply(f)

3) Is there a better way?

If you want to split a string and then reverse the order of the items, no, this is a great way. If you only want to split a certain part of a string starting from the right, then rsplit() is a good method.