Pandas Find name of column in which a string is found

Question

Say I have the following dataframe

data = [['Alex','Dog'],['Bob','Cat'],['Clarke','Giraffe']]
df = pd.DataFrame(data,columns=['Name','Age'])


+--------+---------+
|  Name  | Animal  |
+--------+---------+
| Alex   | Dog     |
| Bob    | Cat     |
| Clarke | Giraffe |
+--------+---------+

What is the most efficient way of getting the name of the column where the string Giraffe is found (i.e. Animal). We can assume there is only one of those string in the entire DataFrame.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14734695/get-column-name-where-value-is-something-in-pandas-dataframe I hope this will help you — Kumar KS, Aug 28 '20 at 09:53
Does this answer your question? [Find column whose name contains a specific string](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21285380/find-column-whose-name-contains-a-specific-string) — Soumendra Mishra, Aug 28 '20 at 10:31

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 28 '20 at 09:59

1

Definitely not the best/elegant answer but it does the trick

word = 'Giraffe'
df.columns[df[df==word].notna().sum()>0][0]

returns 'Animal' as a string.

This does only work if we assume there is only one column which can contain the word.

answered Aug 28 '20 at 09:59

Hestaron

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Pandas Find name of column in which a string is found

1 Answers1