I have a pandas dataframe which consists of players names and statistics from a sporting match. The only source of data lists them in the following format:
# PLAYER M FG 3PT FT REB AST STL PTS
34 BLAKE Brad 38 17 5 6 3 0 3 0 24
12 JONES Ben 42 10 2 6 1 0 4 1 12
8 SMITH Todd J. 16 9 1 4 1 0 3 2 18
5 MAY-DOUGLAS James 9 9 0 3 1 0 2 1 6
44 EDLIN Taylor 12 6 0 5 1 0 0 1 8
The players names are in reverse order: Surname Firstname. I need to transform the names to the current order of firstname lastname. So, specifically:
BLAKE Brad -> Brad BLAKE
SMITH Todd J. -> Todd J. SMITH
MAY-DOUGLAS James -> James MAY-DOUGLAS
The case of the letters do not matter, however I thought potentially they could be used to differentiate the first and lastname. I know all lastnames with always be in uppercase even if they include a hyphen. The first name will always be sentence case (first letter uppercase and the rest lowercase). However some names include the middle name to differentiate players with the same name. I see how a space character can be used a delimiter and potentially use a "split" transformation but it guess difficult with the middle name character.
Is there any suggestions of a function from Pandas I can use to achieve this?
The desired out put is:
# PLAYER M FG 3PT FT REB AST STL PTS
34 Brad BLAKE 38 17 5 6 3 0 3 0 24
12 Ben JONES 42 10 2 6 1 0 4 1 12
8 Todd J. SMITH 16 9 1 4 1 0 3 2 18
5 James MAY-DOUGLAS 9 9 0 3 1 0 2 1 6
44 Taylor EDLIN 12 6 0 5 1 0 0 1 8
Try to split by first whitespace, then reverse the list and join list values with whitespace.
df['PLAYER'] = df['PLAYER'].str.split(' ', 1).str[::-1].str.join(' '))
To reverse only certain names, you can use isin then boolean indexing
names = ['BLAKE Brad', 'SMITH Todd J.', 'MAY-DOUGLAS James']
mask = df['PLAYER'].isin(names)
df.loc[mask, 'PLAYER'] = df.loc[mask, 'PLAYER'].str.split('-', 1).str[::-1].str.join(' ')