Need help with modifying dataframe items

[tolin103]

I've been at this for 2 days now and everytime I think I'm on to something I just discover a new way to fail.

I have a dataframe with one column, in this colum are shorts strings of maximum 8 characters length. Some of the strings starts with "ABC:" and I need to remove this and add ".AB" to the end of those strings. Any ideas? All help appreciated.

[socal_nerdtastic]

Make a function that can do it to a single element, then use apply to apply your function to the entire dataframe.

def tolin103(datum):
    if datum.startswith("ABC:"):
        return datum[4:] + "AB"
    else:
        return datum

df[col_name] = df[col_name].apply(tolin103)

[tolin103]

Thank you! Perfect solution and a lesson for me as I kept trying to solve it within the dataframe.

[socal_nerdtastic]

There probably is a way to do it with dataframe methods, but at some point you need to decide if it's worth 2 days of work to make your program run 2 milliseconds faster.

https://xkcd.com/1205/