Strip strings in pandas columns

Question

I have a small dataframe with entries regarding motorsport balance of performance.

I try to get rid of the string after "@"

This is working fine with the code:

for col in df_engine.columns[1:]:
df_engine[col] = df_engine[col].str.rstrip(r"[\ \@ \d.[0-9]+]")

but is leaving last column unchanged, and I do not understand why. The Ferrari column also has a NaN entry as last position, just as additional info.

Can anyone provide some help?

Thank you in advance!

Answer 1

rstrip does not work with regex. As per the documentation,

to_strip str or None, default None

Specifying the set of characters to be removed. All combinations of this set of characters will be stripped. If None then whitespaces are removed.

>>> "1.76 @ 0.88".rstrip("[\ \@ \d.[0-9]+]")
'1.76 @ 0.88'
>>> "1.76 @ 0.88".rstrip("[\ \@ \d.[0-8]+]") # It's not treated as regex, instead All combinations of characters(`[\ \@ \d.[0-8]+]`) stripped
'1.76'

You could use the replace method instead.

for col in df.columns[1:]:
    df[col] = df[col].str.replace(r"\s@\s[\d\.]+$", "", regex=True)