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pythonpandasrandomlambdashuffle

pandas: apply random.shuffle() to list column


I have a dataframe as follows,

import pandas as pd
df= pd.DataFrame({'text':['The weather is nice','the house is amazing','the flowers are blooming']})

I would like to shuffle the words in each row using random.shuffle(),(e.g the new first row will be 'nice is weather the' ),so I have done the following,

df.new_text = df.text.str.split()

and tried to map or apply shuffle() function but it returns None.

print(df.new_text.map(lambda x: random.shuffle(x)))

or

print(df.new_text.apply(lambda x: random.shuffle(x)))

I am not sure what I am doing wrong here. and then finally I would like to join the shuffled words in the list to get a string per row,

df.new_text = df.new_text.apply( lambda x:' '.join(x))

Solution

  • This does the job.

    shuffled_sentences = {"text":[]}
    
    for sentence in df.values.ravel():
      np.random.shuffle(sentence)
      shuffled_sentences["text"].append(sentence)
    
    shuffled_df = pd.DataFrame(shuffled_sentences)
    

    The thing with np.random.shuffle is that it doesn't return any output. So you need to store the list you want to shuffle in a vraible first. Then if you apply np.random.shuffle on it, the original variable itself would be shuffled.