Pandas Dataframe not update column values

Question

This is print(df['Title']) result.

I am performing regex to replace unnecessary characters

def remove_punctuations(text):
    return re.sub(r']!@-#$%^&*(){};:,./<>?\|`~=_+',' ',text)

df1 = pd.read_csv(file2)
print(df1["Title"])
df1['Title'] = df1['Title'].apply(remove_punctuations)
print(df1["Title"])

What I am doing wrong. Please anyone point this out. Regards,

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 26 '20 at 14:30

1

You should be enclosing the special characters inside a character class, which is denoted by [...] square brackets:

def remove_punctuations(text):
    return re.sub(r'\s*[\[\]!@#$%^&*(){};:,./<>?\|`~=_+-]\s*', ' ', text).strip()

Note that the replacement logic used replaces standalone special characters with a single space. For the edge cases where special characters might start or end the input, we use strip().

answered Dec 26 '20 at 14:30

Tim Biegeleisen

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Can you tell if I want to replace square brackets too. How can I do that ? – Tiger Strom Dec 26 '20 at 14:39
1

My answer should already be replacing square brackets. Look closely. – Tim Biegeleisen Dec 26 '20 at 14:45

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 26 '20 at 14:33

Your regex expression is looking for an exact chain of "]!@-#$%^&*(){};:,./<>?\| punctuations before substituting with a blank " ".

Replace your function with:

def remove_punctuations(text):
    return re.sub(r'[^\w\s]',' ',text)

where it would look for any instance of punctuations or white space.

Pandas Dataframe not update column values

2 Answers2