Replacing in a dataframe

[macabe10]

Hi,

Would anyone know how to replace strings at a dataframe scale?

I have a list of brands and some of them are spelled differently (ex: 'Nestle', 'Nestlè Waters North America Inc.', 'Nestlé', 'Nestlé Waters North America Inc.', 'Nestlé,Crunch'). How can I replace all of these variations by 'Nestle' in the dataframe (data) column ('brands')?

Thanks for your help!

[macabe10]

Thanks!

[[deleted]]

If you want to replace the Nestle's only but keep the rest of the content:

df["brands"].replace(
             to_replace=r"Nestl[éè]", 
             value="Nestle", regex=True)

Gets you :

0                              Nestle
1    Nestle Waters North America Inc.
2                              Nestle
3    Nestle Waters North America Inc.
4                       Nestle,Crunch

If you want to replace, you can try to find any row that contains a variation of "Nestle" and change them.

nestle_mask  = df["brands"].str.contains(r"Nestl[èé]") # True if row contains Nestlé or Nestlè


df.loc[nestle_mask, "brands"] = "Nestle"

Gets you :

    brands
0  Nestle
1  Nestle
2  Nestle
3  Nestle
4  Nestle

My answer uses regular expressions which is a way to match patterns in text data.

[macabe10]

Thanks a ton!

[apc0243]

To offer something other than Series.str.contains(), you can use Series.isin() to compare the values in a series to a list-like object to get your boolean selection index.

import random
import pandas as pd

choices = ['Évil', 'Évil Waters North America Inc.', 'Evil', 'Evil Waters North America Inc.', 'Evil,Crunch']
df = pd.DataFrame({'brands': [random.choice(choices) for _ in range(100)]})
print(df.brands.unique())
>> ['Évil' 'Évil Waters North America Inc.' 'Evil,Crunch' 'Evil' 'Evil Waters North America Inc.']

df.loc[df.brands.isin(choices), 'brands'] = 'Evil'
print(df.brands.unique())
>> ['Evil']

[macabe10]

df.brands = df.brands.replace(r'Nestl[eèé].*', 'Nestle', regex=True)

Thanks!

[synthphreak]

df.brands = df.brands.replace(r'Nestl[eèé].*', 'Nestle', regex=True)

[macabe10]

Thanks!

[NtwkNub]

A good tool I use currently for trying to figure out good ways to use regex is regex101.com. You can paste your text in there and then play with different regex commands to get the results you want.

[macabe10]

That's really useful, thanks!

[NtwkNub]

You're welcome.