1

I have a dataframe like the one below. I would like to find all columns in the dataframe that contain a string ‘abc’ and return a list of those fields like the example below. If I was looking for the rows I would use isin, but I'm not sure how to get the columns. Any tips are greatly appreciated.

Example:

Print df

Field1  Field2  Field3
f_abc   23      dog
Df3     bb      ju


Return 

Field1
user3476463
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2 Answers2

5

You can accomplish this with list comprehension on df.columns.

First let's create an example dataframe:

df = pd.DataFrame(columns=["A", "B", "C"], data=[['abc']*3]*3)
df['D'] = 'ab'

results in:

     A   B   C  D
0   abc abc abc ab
1   abc abc abc ab
2   abc abc abc ab

Now let's print only the columns that contain 'abc':

print([col for col in df.columns if df[col].str.contains("abc").any()])

['A', 'B', 'C']

dportman
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2

You can also make use of pandas pd.Series.isin which returns a boolean series.

mydf = pd.DataFrame(data={'Field1':['f_abc', 21], 'Field2':[23, 'bb'], 'Field3':['dog', 'ju']}, columns=['Field1', 'Field2', 'Field3'])

print([i for i in mydf if mydf[i].isin(['f_abc']).any()])

(don't yet have the reputation to have added this as a comment)

MrSillyBilly
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