Swapping first and last name and take initials in pandas

Question

I have the following dataset containing two columns full with names:

df = pd.DataFrame({'Player1':[ 'Roger Federer ', 'Alex De Minaur'], 'Player2':['Bernabe Zapata Miralles','Andy Roddick']})

with output:

          Player1                  Player2
0  Roger Federer   Bernabe Zapata Miralles
1  Alex De Minaur             Andy Roddick

I want however to convert these names in the pandas DataFrame so it looks like:

        Player1             Player2
0    Federer R.  Zapata Miralles B.
1  De Minaur A.          Roddick A.

Full middle name(if present) - full surname - First letter of the first name followed by a dot.

There are a few comparable questions on stackoverflow that could help:

Preserve full surname, get initials of first name (and middle name if some) in pandas column Swapping first and last name positions

Anything would help!

Answer 1

string methods are generally slow, but you can try the below which stacks the dataframe, the performs a str.split , then unstack back to original shape:

s = df.stack()
s1 = s.str.split()
out = s1.str[1:].str.join(" ").add(" "+s.str[0].str[0].add(".")).unstack()

---

print(out)

       Player1             Player2
0    Federer R.  Zapata Miralles B.
1  De Minaur A.          Roddick A.