Searching for a string in a column in pandas not working

Question

I am trying to search the following string in my pandas DataFrame but its not being able to find the string even though its present in the dataframe.

My code is:

df_temp = pd.DataFrame({'name' :['Wilkes, Mrs. James (Ellen Needs)']})
df_temp['name'].str.contains('Wilkes, Mrs. James (Ellen Needs)').sum()

This is giving me an output of zero where the expected output should be '1' . Is this because the string contains brackets or space or anything else? Is there a better method to search for strings in Pandas.

Any help would be really appreciated, Thankyou!

Answer 1

You should try doing this:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'name': ['Wilkes, Mrs. James (Ellen Needs)']})
df_2 = df[df['name'].str.contains("Wilkes, Mrs. James \(Ellen Needs\)")]

print("Number of rows:", len(df_2.index))

Which returns:

Number of rows: 1