Check for words from list and remove those words in pandas dataframe column

Question

I have a list as follows,

remove_words = [\'abc\', \'deff\', \'pls\']

The following is the data frame which I am having with column name \'

Answer 1

Totally taking @MaxU's pattern!

We can use pd.DataFrame.replace by setting the regex parameter to True and passing a dictionary of dictionaries that specifies the pattern and what to replace with for each column.

pat = '|'.join([r'\b{}\b'.format(w) for w in remove_words])

df.assign(new=df.replace(dict(string={pat: ''}), regex=True))

               string              new
0  abc stack overflow   stack overflow
1              abc123           abc123
2          def comedy           comedy
3          definitely       definitely
4            pls lkjh             lkjh
5             pls1234          pls1234

Answer 2

Try this:

In [98]: pat = r'\b(?:{})\b'.format('|'.join(remove_words))

In [99]: pat
Out[99]: '\\b(?:abc|def|pls)\\b'

In [100]: df['new'] = df['string'].str.replace(pat, '')

In [101]: df
Out[101]:
               string              new
0  abc stack overflow   stack overflow
1              abc123           abc123
2          def comedy           comedy
3          definitely       definitely
4            pls lkjh             lkjh
5             pls1234          pls1234