Advanced pandas—Going Beyond the Basics/

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String Methods—Leading and Trailing Characters

String Methods—Leading and Trailing Characters

Discover how to effectively handle leading and trailing string characters with string methods in pandas.

We'll cover the following...

Introduction

We wrap up the exploration of advanced string methods by delving into the methods that allow us to deal effectively with leading and trailing characters in text strings. As before, we’ll use the mock customer dataset from an e-commerce platform.

Preview of Mock E-Commerce Customer Dataset

customer_id

title

first_name

last_name

ip_address

email

264-42-4576

Mr

gino

Crowdson

82.48.134.48/5

gcrowdson0@tamu.edu

165-49-2539

Ms

hailey

kirsche

61.122.97.13/13

ekirsche1@rambler.ru

763-23-7634

Dr

Viviyan

Peschet

253.140.11.162/2

rpeschet@ning.com

Note that the columns in the DataFrame for this dataset have already been converted into StringDtype.

Padding

The Padding (aka filling) of string values is adding extra characters to the beginning or end of a string to make it up to a certain length. It can be helpful when we need all of our strings to be the same length for formatting purposes or when we want to align strings in a table consistently.

The pad() method is a highly versatile method for performing padding of texts. For example, we can run the following code to pad the left side of each string value in the first_name column with an underscore _ so that they are all ten characters long:

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# Perform left padding with '_' to reach 10 characters

df['first_name_padded'] = df['first_name'].str.pad(width=10,

                                                   side='left',

                                                   fillchar='_')



# View output

print(df[['first_name', 'first_name_padded']])

In the output above, we can see that the width parameter determines the width of the resulting string so that balance characters are filled with the character defined in the fillchar parameter. The default value of fillchar ...