pandas

Filtering DataFrame by list of substrings

Building off this answer, is there a way to filter a Pandas dataframe by a list of substrings?

Say I want to find all rows where df['menu_item'] contains fresh or spaghetti

Without something like this:

df[df['menu_item'].str.contains('fresh') | (df['menu_item'].str.contains('spaghetti')]

Solution

  • The str.contains method you're using accepts regex, so use the regex | as or:

    df[df['menu_item'].str.contains('fresh|spaghetti')]

    Example Input:

              menu_item
0        fresh fish
1      fresher fish
2           lasagna
3     spaghetti o's
4  something edible

    Example Output:

           menu_item
0     fresh fish
1   fresher fish
3  spaghetti o's