Remove duplicated chars in column

Question

I have a DataFrame with the following info

countries    flags
FR           aabb
DE           abc
UK           bbcc
IT           ddd

I want to transform the flags column into a new column that contains only the non-duplicated charts of the flags column. The result should be

countries    flags
FR           ab
DE           abc
UK           bc
IT           d

Consecutive duplicates or *all* duplicates? ie... does `aba` stay `aba` or become `ab` ? — Jon Clements, Dec 05 '16 at 13:35
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9841303/removing-duplicate-characters-from-a-string — Erik Šťastný, Dec 05 '16 at 13:36

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 05 '16 at 13:37

You can use apply with set which remove duplicates, sort them by sorted and last join to string:

df.flags = df.flags.apply(lambda x: "".join(sorted(set(x))))
print (df)
  countries flags
0        FR    ab
1        DE   abc
2        UK    bc
3        IT     d

Remove duplicated chars in column

1 Answers1