counting words in a datacolumn in pandas

Question

hi I have a dataframe,

df,

 Name
 Raj
 NaN
 Ravi,kumar

I am trying to get the count of words in df["Name"],

I tried, df['count']=df['Names'].str.count(',') + 1

but I am getting "1" for NaN field, how to resolve this I am getting

 Name        count
 Raj          1
 NaN          1  
 Ravi,kumar   2

but my desired output should be,

 Name        count
 Raj          1
 NaN            
 Ravi,kumar   2

Answer 1

It looks like NaN is a string here. Try doing this:

df['Name'].replace('NaN', np.nan).str.count(',') + 1

You should get something along these lines:

0    1.0
1    NaN
2    2.0
Name: Name, dtype: float64

You can then call .fillna('') to fill in the blanks.