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pythonpandasdataframe

Subset columns from pandas dataframe that do not start with "X"

I'm trying to subset a dataframe by not selecting columns that I do not want that all start with the same phrase. In other words I want the entire dataframe, except for columns that start with "death".

Say I have a dataframe with these columns

player birthDay birthMonth birthYear deathDay deathMonth deathYear

I've created a filter list for columns I don't want to select

cols = [col for col in df if col.startswith("death")]
df[~cols]

But when I run this I get the error: bad operand type for unary ~: 'list'

How come I am receiving this error? And is there a better way of doing this?

Solution

  • You can just reverse the logic to get a positive column list instead of a negative one:

    cols = [col for col in df if not col.startswith("death")]
df[cols]