Replace whole string if it contains substring in pandas

Question

I want to replace all strings that contain a specific substring. So for example if I have this dataframe:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({\'name\': [\         


        

Answer 1

You can use str.contains to mask the rows that contain 'ball' and then overwrite with the new value:

In [71]:
df.loc[df['sport'].str.contains('ball'), 'sport'] = 'ball sport'
df

Out[71]:
    name       sport
0    Bob      tennis
1   Jane  ball sport
2  Alice  ball sport

To make it case-insensitive pass `case=False:

df.loc[df['sport'].str.contains('ball', case=False), 'sport'] = 'ball sport'

Answer 2

A different str.contains

 df['support'][df.name.str.contains('ball')] = 'ball support'

Answer 3

You can use apply with a lambda. The x parameter of the lambda function will be each value in the 'sport' column:

df.sport = df.sport.apply(lambda x: 'ball sport' if 'ball' in x else x)

Answer 4

you can use str.replace

df.sport.str.replace(r'(^.*ball.*$)', 'ball sport')

0        tennis
1    ball sport
2    ball sport
Name: sport, dtype: object

reassign with

df['sport'] = df.sport.str.replace(r'(^.*ball.*$)', 'ball sport')
df