Removing " " in a column

Question

I have a DF as shown below

DF =
Index   R
0       A
1       "B,C"
2       D
3       "E,F"

I want to remove all "" from the values:

DF_New =
Index   R
0       A
1       B,C
2       D
3       E,F

Using join(literal_eval(x)) or other constructions don't work. What should I do?

`df.applymap(lambda x: x.strip('\"') if isinstance(x, str) else x)` if you want to drop double quotes along the entire df. — Tom Wojcik, Aug 19 '18 at 15:38
@wwii You were right. I had to construct it in another way. Now it works. — Mi., Aug 19 '18 at 16:16

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 19 '18 at 15:25

1

You can use the .str accessor:

>>> df['R'].str.replace('"', '')
0      A
1    B,C
2      D
3    E,F
Name: R, dtype: object

which should eliminate all literal double-quotes from that column.

Note that each result will be a str such as 'B,C'. If you want to convert each to a list container, use:

>>> df['R'].str.replace('"', '').str.split()
0      [A]
1    [B,C]
2      [D]
3    [E,F]
Name: R, dtype: object

answered Aug 19 '18 at 15:25

Brad Solomon

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Eh, this was the first thing I tried and it didn't do a thing. I mean even this did nothing ".replace('^"', '', regex=True).replace('"$', '', regex=True)" – Mi. Aug 19 '18 at 15:37

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 19 '18 at 15:26

You could use:

DF.loc[DF['R'].str.startswith('"'), 'R'] = DF['R'].str[1:]
DF.loc[DF['R'].str.endswith('"'), 'R'] = DF['R'].str[:-1]

For example,

In [5]: DF
Out[5]: 
   Index      R
0      0      A
1      1  "B,C"
2      2      D
3      3  "E,F"

In [6]: DF.loc[DF['R'].str.startswith('"'), 'R'] = DF['R'].str[1:]
In [7]: DF.loc[DF['R'].str.endswith('"'), 'R'] = DF['R'].str[:-1]
In [8]: DF
Out[8]: 
   Index    R
0      0    A
1      1  B,C
2      2    D
3      3  E,F

Note that this will only replace double quotes that appear at the beginning or end of the string, not in the middle.

Removing " " in a column

2 Answers2