pandas String manipulation Checking for contents of a string
Example
str.contains() method can be used to check if a pattern occurs in each string of a Series. str.startswith() and str.endswith() methods can also be used as more specialized versions.
In [1]: animals = pd.Series(['cat', 'dog', 'bear', 'cow', 'bird', 'owl', 'rabbit', 'snake'])
Check if strings contain the letter 'a':
In [2]: animals.str.contains('a')
Out[2]:
0 True
1 False
2 True
3 False
4 False
5 False
6 True
7 True
8 True
dtype: bool
This can be used as a boolean index to return only the animals containing the letter 'a':
In [3]: animals[animals.str.contains('a')]
Out[3]:
0 cat
2 bear
6 rabbit
7 snake
dtype: object
str.startswith and str.endswith methods work similarly, but they also accept tuples as inputs.
In [4]: animals[animals.str.startswith(('b', 'c'))]
# Returns animals starting with 'b' or 'c'
Out[4]:
0 cat
2 bear
3 cow
4 bird
dtype: object
