Well, I’m cleaning a dataset, using Pandas. I have a column called “Country”, where different rows could have numbers or other information into parenthesis and I have to remove them, for example: Australia1, Perú (country), 3Costa Rica, etc. To do this, I’m getting the column and I make a mapping over it.
pattern = "([a-zA-Z]+[s]*[a-aZ-Z]+)(?:[(]*.*[)]*)" df['Country'] = df['Country'].str.extract(pattern)
But I have a problem with this regex, I cannot match names as “United States of America”, because it only takes “United “. How can I repeat unlimited the pattern of the fisrt group to match the whole name?
Thanks!
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Answer
In this situation, I will clean the data step by step.
df_str = '''
Country
Australia1
Perú (country)
3Costa Rica
United States of America
'''
df = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(df_str.strip()), sep='n')
# handle the data
(df['Country']
.str.replace('d+', '', regex=True) # remove number
.str.split('(').str[0] # get items before `(`
.str.strip() # strip spaces
)