Check for specific character in if statement

Question

I wanted to ask a question today, that how can I use the dataframe.str.contains function to search for a specific character in a if statement. I will elaborate the details in the following, and Thank you everyone for helping me.

So I want to do a calculation through the data, but first I need to sort the data by using the if function, the code that I wrote as following:

if df['ColumnA'].str.contains('-') is True:       
    df['Price']=df['ColumnB'].astype(float) + df['ColumnC'].astype(float)/32
else:
    df['Price']=df['ColumnB'].astype(float)/32

Basically, if there is a '-' contained in the Column A string, the price will be ColumnB + ColumnC divided by 32, but if the column A does not contain the '-', the price will be ColumnB divided by 32

Does anyone know how can I settle the if statement? Thank you so much

[This answer](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10715519/conditionally-fill-column-values-based-on-another-columns-value-in-pandas) may help you. — Seon, Nov 14 '22 at 23:19

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Nov 15 '22 at 00:09

Your code checks the whole column for the character not element-by-element. You can use the numpy where function (note there is a pandas where function but it works in a slightly different way). So your code could be:

import numpy as np    # better placed with other imports

df['Price'] = np.where(df['ColumnA'].str.contains('-'),
                df['ColumnB'].astype(float) + df['ColumnC'].astype(float)/32,
                df['ColumnB'].astype(float)/32)

Check for specific character in if statement

1 Answers1