regex - How to remove parentheses and all data within using Pandas/Python?

Question

I have a dataframe where I want to remove all parentheses and stuff inside it.

I checked out : How can I remove text within parentheses with a regex?

Where the answer to remove the data was

re.sub(r'([^)]*)', '', filename)

I tried this as well as

re.sub(r'(.*?)', '', filename)

However, I got an error: expected a string or buffer

When I tried using the column df['Column Name'] I got no item named 'Column Name'

I checked the dataframe using df.head() and it showed up as a clean table with the column names as what I wanted them to be....however when I use the re expression to remove the (stuff) it isn't recognizing the column name that I have.

I normally use

df['name'].str.replace(" ()","") 

However, I want to remove the parentheses and what is inside....How can I do this using either regex or pandas?

Thanks!

Here is the solution I used...thanks for the help!

All['Manufacturer Standard Name'] = All['Manufacturer Standard Name'].str.replace(r"(.*)","")

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20894525/how-to-remove-parentheses-and-all-data-within-using-pandas-python

Answer 1

df['name'].str.replace(r"(.*)","")

You can't run re functions directly on pandas objects. You have to loop them for each element inside the object. So Series.str.replace((r"(.*)", "") is just syntactic sugar for Series.apply(lambda x: re.sub(r"(.*)", "", x)).