python replace word not substring

Question

I want to replace a word by another in a column of a dataframe. Here is my python code:

import pandas as pd
text="age engage"
df=pd.DataFrame([x.split(';') for x in text.split('\n')])
df['text'] = df[0].str.replace(r"age","âge")

The codes that I found on stackoverflow (and this one included) permit me to obtain df['text']="âge engâge", when I want to obtain df['text']="âge engage". Could anyone help me improve my code? I have dozens of different words that I want to replace in my dataframe, so I would like to use a simple code to implement to different words.

Answer 1

Try-

import pandas as pd
text="age engage"
df=pd.DataFrame([x.split(';') for x in text.split('\n')])
df['text'] = df[0].str.replace(r"^age","âge") # the carrot indicates to only match from the start of the line

Result

        0        text
0  age engage  âge engage 

You can also look in regex, a good site to play around when it comes to pattern matching Regex 101