How do I use string methods in pandas?

Key Takeaways

hello and welcome back to my Q&A video series about the pandas library in Python and the question for today is how do I use string Methods in pandas all right so in Python we're used to having access to lots of string Methods for example if I have the string hello and I want to make it uppercase I just use the string method upper Okay so uh there you actually have access to a lot of string Methods in pandas you just have to know how to find them so let's uh pull up an example data set so first we import pandas aspd and our data set for today is uh online orders from the Chipotle restaurant chain so I'm going to say orders equals pd. readable and pass the URL bit. Le chip orders okay and here are the first five rows of the data frame and so let's pretend we want to make the item name uppercase okay so um you might think oh this would be a series method and I would just say something like orders do item name. uper and you've almost got it right but that's not going to work if you want to use a string method on a panda series you actually use you say st. uper so that's saying it's a string method and when we do that you can see that we've gotten back the uppercase versions of each of the item names and if you like you could overwrite the original uh item name series with these values okay so uh let's look at another method as an example so another string method is contains so this is how I check for the presence of a substring so I could say uh Str str. contains and I'm going to look for chicken okay and when I run that I get back a series of booing a series of trues and falses indicating whether a particular item in this series contained chicken so we see false false false false true and that's because this has uh Chicken in it and you might ask well why would we uh use that well we might want to filter the data frame like this and only look at um uh rows in the data frame that have chicken in the item name okay so there are tons of string Methods you have access to um what you'll want to look at is the pandas API reference so I'll link to this in the description below but you can just Google pandas API reference and you'll get to this page and once you get here you'll want to search for string handling okay and find this section and then you'll want to you'll be able to see all the different string Methods you have access to okay all right uh as always I'm going to end with a bonus and in fact I have two bonuses for today and the first bonus is just to show you that you can chain together uh string Methods okay so let's say that I want to remove the bracket characters from these strings in Choice description okay okay so if I said orders. Choice description. st. replace and then the way replace works I say I want to replace a left bracket with nothing okay if I run that it indeed removes the left bracket okay from all every element in the series what if I also want to remove the right bracket well I can actually just change chain this with another replace method so remember this returns a pandis series and as such I can run another series method on it so I just say. st. replace and this time I want to replace the right bracket with nothing and there you go okay so that's the first bonus the second bonus is just to tell you that um many panda string Methods actually will accept regular Expressions okay so uh if you don't know regular Expressions this won't make much sense but um I'm going to write that previous line of code uh more simply with a regular expression so I want to say I'm just going to define a character class you know so using brackets that defines my character class and then I'm saying uh I want to replace either a left bracket or a right bracket uh with nothing so actually it looks a little funny but I put brackets in there I have to escape both of them but when I run that um it indeed does work in replacing the left and right brackets okay so that was using regular Expressions all right well that is it for today thanks as as always for joining me feel free to click subscribe if you'd like to see more videos like this uh feel free to leave a question or a tip in the comments below and that way we can all learn from one another and that is it so I hope to see you again soon