NLP: How do I search for a string that has brackets?

Question

I'm trying to filter a dataframe if col1 contains any substring from a list. The problem is that one substring contains brackets that cause an error (in bold in the illustration). Any solution? Thanks!

index   fruit_name
0       "apple"
1       "pear"
2       "passionfruit (Passiflora)"
4       "grape"

substring_list = ['apple',**'(passiflora)'**]
df[df.fruit_name.str.contains('|'.join(substring_list))]

Answer 1

Brackets like () are special characters in regex, so you need to use a backslash \ before them like:

df = pd.DataFrame({'fruit_name': ["apple","pear","passionfruit (Passiflora)", "grape"]})

substring_list = ['apple','\(passiflora\)']
print (df[df.fruit_name.str.contains('|'.join(substring_list), case=False)]) 
                  fruit_name
0                      apple
2  passionfruit (Passiflora)