How to delete ANY row containing specific string in pandas?

Question

I know that there are many ways to delete rows containing a specific value in a column in python, but I'm wondering if there is a more efficient way to do this by checking all columns in a dataset at once and deleting all rows that contain a specific value WITHOUT turning it into NaN and dropping all of them. To clarify, I don't want to lose all columns with strings/NaN I just want to lose rows that have a specific value.

For example, I'm looking to delete all rows with participants that contain an answer "refused" in any column. So if my table looked like this:

Subject	Race	Gender	Weight
1	black	female	123
2	white	refused	145
3	white	male	165
4	asian	male	refused
5	refused	male	128
6	white	male	nan
7	asian	male	refused
8	black	male	nan

I would want to implement a statement that would filter it to keep only subjects that didn't have any responses with a string containing "refused":

Subject	Race	Gender	Weight
1	black	female	123
3	white	male	165
6	white	male	nan
8	black	male	nan

Does anyone know how to filter this way across an entire dataset?

Answer 1

You can use isin with any.

df = df[~df.isin(['refused']).any(axis=1)]