CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonpython-2.7pandas
PointXIV
PointXIV

Reputation: 1288

Splitting strings in a series when a number is encountered in python

I have a series of strings in a dataframe, and I want to get rid of everything in the string once a number starts. Here's an example:

sstrings['abc12390859', 'def1959836', 'dab3496876', 'gh34643267']

so, in the end, I want it to be:

sstrings['abc', 'def', 'dab', 'gh']

I thought about doing something like:

df['sstrings'] = df['sstrings'].str.split()

but since the leading number isn't always the same, I'm not sure how to make that work.

I saw this but that doesn't seem to work with a series.

Is there a way to do this without looping through the series and using re.split?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 496

Answers (2)

Jan Vlcinsky
Jan Vlcinsky

Reputation: 44112

In case, the final part of each string consists only from numbers, you can use:

>>> lst = ['abc12390859', 'def1959836', 'dab3496876', 'gh34643267']
>>> map(lambda txt: txt.rstrip("0123456789"), lst)
['abc', 'def', 'dab', 'gh']

or using list comprehension:

>>> [txt.rstrip("0123456789") for txt in  lst]
['abc', 'def', 'dab', 'gh']

Upvotes: 0

timgeb
timgeb

Reputation: 78740

You could use a regular expression. Demo:

>>> import re
>>> s = ['abc12390859', 'def1959836', 'dab3496876', 'gh34643267']    
>>> ss = [re.match(r'[^\d]+', x).group(0) for x in s]
>>> ss
['abc', 'def', 'dab', 'gh']

Explanation:

\d matches any digit.
[^\d] matches anything that is not a digit
[^\d]+ matches a sequence of one or more non-digits.

The documentation for re.match can be found here. It will return a MatchObject (from which we extract the matching string with group) if zero or more characters at the beginning of the string match our pattern [^\d]+. re.match is applied to all x in your original list s with a list comprehension.

Upvotes: 3

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