pandas: best way to select all columns whose names start with X

Question

I have a DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame({\'foo.aa\': [1, 2.1, np.nan, 4.7, 5.6, 6.8],
                   \'foo.fighters         


        

Answer 1

In my case I needed a list of prefixes

colsToScale=["production", "test", "development"]
dc[dc.columns[dc.columns.str.startswith(tuple(colsToScale))]]

Answer 2

The simplest way is to use str directly on column names, there is no need for pd.Series

df.loc[:,df.columns.str.startswith("foo")]