Python dataframe remove substring before specific character if ture

Question

I am trying to remove the numbers before "-" in the name column. But not all rows have numbers before the name. How do I remove the numbers in rows that have numbers and keep the rows that don't have numbers in front untouched?

Sample df:

country     Name
UK          5413-Marcus
Russia      5841-Natasha
Hong Kong   Keith
China       7777-Wang

Desired df

country     Name
UK          Marcus
Russia      Natasha
Hong Kong   Keith
China       Wang

I appreciate any assistance! Thanks in advance!

RichieV · Answer 1 · 2020-09-03T08:08:54.440

2

Pandas has string accessors for series. If you split and get the last element of the resulting list, even if a row does not have the delimeter '-' you still want the last element of that one-element list.

df.Name = df.Name.str.split('-').str.get(-1)

edited Sep 03 '20 at 08:08

answered Sep 03 '20 at 08:04

RichieV

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Thank you for your answer. I just tried it but it gave me an error: KeyError: -1 – Matthias Gallagher Sep 03 '20 at 08:07
Thanks for the edit. This answer works now. Really appreciate it!! – Matthias Gallagher Sep 03 '20 at 08:09

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 03 '20 at 08:08

You might use str.lstrip for that task following way:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'country':['UK','Russia','Hong Kong','China'],'Name':['5413-Marcus','5841-Natasha','Keith','7777-Wang']})
df['Name'] = df['Name'].str.lstrip('-0123456789')
print(df)

Output:

     country     Name
0         UK   Marcus
1     Russia  Natasha
2  Hong Kong    Keith
3      China     Wang

.lstrip does remove leading characters, .rstrip trailing characters and .strip both.

Python dataframe remove substring before specific character if ture

2 Answers2