pandas rename column if contains string

Question

I would like to go through all the columns in a dataframe and rename (or map) columns if they contain certain strings.

For example: rename all columns that contain \'agr

Answer 1

You can use str.replace to process the columns first, and then re-assign the new columns back to the DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'A_agriculture': [1,2,3],
                   'B_agriculture': [11,22,33],
                   'C': [4,5,6]})
df.columns = df.columns.str.replace('agriculture', 'agri')
print df

Output:

   A_agri  B_agri  C
0       1      11  4
1       2      22  5
2       3      33  6