[SOLVED] Removing punctuations in dataframe using for loop

Removing punctuations in dataframe using for loop

I have a dataframe that looks like below

  A        B       C       D      E
0 Orange  Dad's  X Eyes   3d.    Navy
1 pink.   Mum's  Bored.   ooo.   NaN
2 Yellow  NaN    Sad      Gray   NaN

I'm trying to remove punctuations in every column in the dataframe using for loop

import string
string.punctuation

#defining the function to remove punctuation
def remove_punctuation(text):
    punctuationfree="".join([i for i in text if i not in string.punctuation])
    return punctuationfree

#storing the puntuation free text
col=['A','B','C','D','E']

for i in col:
    df[i].apply(lambda x:remove_punctuation(x))

But I get

    "TypeError                                 Traceback (most recent call last)
    /var/folders/jd/lln92nb4p01g8grr0000gn/T/ipykernel_24651/2417883.py in <module>
         12 
         13 for i in col:
    ---> 14     df[i].apply(lambda x:remove_punctuation(x))
      
TypeError: 'float' object is not iterable"

Can anyone help me on this please? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Solution

You are getting the error because of NaN values, try to check for NaN upfront:

def remove_punctuation(text):
    if pd.isna(text):
        return text
    punctuationfree="".join([i for i in text if i not in string.punctuation])
    return punctuationfree

for c in df:
    df[c] = df[c].apply(remove_punctuation)

OUTPUT

# df
          A     B       C     D     E
0   Orange   Dads  X Eyes    3d  Navy
1     pink   Mums   Bored   ooo   NaN
2   Yellow   NaN     Sad  Gray   NaN