pythonpandas

How to drop rows from pandas data frame that contains a particular string in a particular column?

I have a very large data frame in python and I want to drop all rows that have a particular string inside a particular column.

For example, I want to drop all rows which have the string "XYZ" as a substring in the column C of the data frame.

Can this be implemented in an efficient way using .drop() method?

Solution

  • pandas has vectorized string operations, so you can just filter out the rows that contain the string you don't want:

    In [91]: df = pd.DataFrame(dict(A=[5,3,5,6], C=["foo","bar","fooXYZbar", "bat"]))

In [92]: df
Out[92]:
   A          C
0  5        foo
1  3        bar
2  5  fooXYZbar
3  6        bat

In [93]: df[~df.C.str.contains("XYZ")]
Out[93]:
   A    C
0  5  foo
1  3  bar
3  6  bat