I have a pandas data frame with about 2000 rows I have to do some work on and I’m stuck on one column. The column consists of comma separated words. What I need to do is to trim these words so only the first 10 ones are kept and discard the rest.
What I have tried so far is to turn the series into a list, then split with a comma separator, extract the first ten items and then add back the comma. All with a bunch of for loops. My code is erratic and even this is giving me some trouble but I have learnt how to do this before. I was hoping for a more elegant solution using a lambda function or list comprehension.
You could try something like this, where 'a' would be the name of your column:
df['a'] = df['a'].apply(lambda x: ",".join(x.split(",")[:10]))