Drop columns whose name contains a specific string from pandas DataFrame

Question

I have a pandas dataframe with the following column names:

Result1, Test1, Result2, Test2, Result3, Test3, etc...

I want to drop all the columns whose name c

Answer 1

You can filter out the columns you DO want using 'filter'

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

data2 = [{'test2': 1, 'result1': 2}, {'test': 5, 'result34': 10, 'c': 20}]

df = pd.DataFrame(data2)

df

    c   result1     result34    test    test2
0   NaN     2.0     NaN     NaN     1.0
1   20.0    NaN     10.0    5.0     NaN

Now filter

df.filter(like='result',axis=1)

Get..

   result1  result34
0   2.0     NaN
1   NaN     10.0

Answer 2

This method does everything in place. Many of the other answers create copies and are not as efficient:

df.drop(df.columns[df.columns.str.contains('Test')], axis=1, inplace=True)

Answer 3

import pandas as pd

import numpy as np

array=np.random.random((2,4))

df=pd.DataFrame(array, columns=('Test1', 'toto', 'test2', 'riri'))

print df

      Test1      toto     test2      riri
0  0.923249  0.572528  0.845464  0.144891
1  0.020438  0.332540  0.144455  0.741412

cols = [c for c in df.columns if c.lower()[:4] != 'test']

df=df[cols]

print df
       toto      riri
0  0.572528  0.144891
1  0.332540  0.741412

Answer 4

Use the DataFrame.select method:

In [38]: df = DataFrame({'Test1': randn(10), 'Test2': randn(10), 'awesome': randn(10)})

In [39]: df.select(lambda x: not re.search('Test\d+', x), axis=1)
Out[39]:
   awesome
0    1.215
1    1.247
2    0.142
3    0.169
4    0.137
5   -0.971
6    0.736
7    0.214
8    0.111
9   -0.214

Answer 5

This can be done neatly in one line with:

df = df.drop(df.filter(regex='Test').columns, axis=1)