Accessing the first element of a pandas dataframe

Asked Feb 28 '19 at 16:02

Active Feb 28 '19 at 16:02

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I have a dataframe called cars. I want to create a new column called 'Brand_name' with just the first element of the brand column but I keep getting error message 'list index out of range'

cars = Brand                    Units_sold
       [Toyota]                   87
       [Acura]                    99
       [Toyota, Ford, GMC]        87
       [Kia, Honda]               25
       [Honda]                    109
       [Mercedes, Bugatti]        76
......

Here is what I what to achieve

cars = Brand                    Units_sold         Brand_name
       [Toyota]                   87               [Toyota]
       [Acura]                    99               [Acura]
       [Ford,Toyota, GMC]         87               [Ford]
       [Kia, Honda]               25               [Kia]
       [Honda]                    109              [Honda]
       [Mercedes, Bugatti]        76               [Mercedes]
....

Here is the code I applied

cars['Brand_name'] = cars['Brand'].apply(lambda x: x[0])

asked Feb 28 '19 at 16:02

Python Newbie

Use `cars['Brand_name'] = cars['Brand'].str[0]` – jezrael Feb 28 '19 at 16:03
Hi, thanks for your feedback. I tried using that code but all it did was give me the first alphabet of the different car brands – Python Newbie Feb 28 '19 at 19:36
So use `cars['Brand_name'] = cars['Brand'].str. strip('[]').str.split().str[0]` – jezrael Feb 28 '19 at 19:43
1

thank you so much. That works – Python Newbie Feb 28 '19 at 19:56

Accessing the first element of a pandas dataframe

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