pandas String manipulation Slicing strings
Example
Strings in a Series can be sliced using .str.slice() method, or more conveniently, using brackets (.str[]).
In [1]: ser = pd.Series(['Lorem ipsum', 'dolor sit amet', 'consectetur adipiscing elit'])
In [2]: ser
Out[2]:
0 Lorem ipsum
1 dolor sit amet
2 consectetur adipiscing elit
dtype: object
Get the first character of each string:
In [3]: ser.str[0]
Out[3]:
0 L
1 d
2 c
dtype: object
Get the first three characters of each string:
In [4]: ser.str[:3]
Out[4]:
0 Lor
1 dol
2 con
dtype: object
Get the last character of each string:
In [5]: ser.str[-1]
Out[5]:
0 m
1 t
2 t
dtype: object
Get the last three characters of each string:
In [6]: ser.str[-3:]
Out[6]:
0 sum
1 met
2 lit
dtype: object
Get the every other character of the first 10 characters:
In [7]: ser.str[:10:2]
Out[7]:
0 Lrmis
1 dlrst
2 cnett
dtype: object
Pandas behaves similarly to Python when handling slices and indices. For example, if an index is outside the range, Python raises an error:
In [8]:'Lorem ipsum'[12]
# IndexError: string index out of range
However, if a slice is outside the range, an empty string is returned:
In [9]: 'Lorem ipsum'[12:15]
Out[9]: ''
Pandas returns NaN when an index is out of range:
In [10]: ser.str[12]
Out[10]:
0 NaN
1 e
2 a
dtype: object
And returns an empty string if a slice is out of range:
In [11]: ser.str[12:15]
Out[11]:
0
1 et
2 adi
dtype: object
