how to access the elements of a list that is a pandas object-CodePudding

I have a listof characters (sed) which is a series pandas object in dataframe, I try to browse this list as a normal list to retrieve the position of elements that are not spaces with this code:

 for i in sed :
    if j != " " :   
      print(j)          
      pos=sed.index(j)
      print(pos)

but with print(j), I see that it retrieves the whole list, so when I try with a normal list (manually without dataframe) I get the right result:

seq="   M   " 
list=seq.tolist()
 for j in list : 
   if j != " ":  
     print(j)   
     pos=list.index(j)  
     print(pos)



result: j = M and pos = 3

CodePudding user response：

You can filter for the rows where the value is different from a space ' '

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':list('my name is')})

   a
0  m
1  y
2   
3  n
4  a
5  m
6  e
7   
8  i
9  s

# Get only the values that are not empty strings

print(df[df['a'].ne(' ')])

Output:
   a
0  m
1  y
3  n
4  a
5  m
6  e
8  i
9  s

Or, if there is variety of spaces, like 1/2/3, you can use str methods on pandas series, which yields the same result

print(df[df['a'].str.contains('\S ')])

CodePudding user response：

You can use simpler method with a list comprehension and native Python Code :

result = [ch for ch in seq.split(" ") if ch != '']

If you have more special characters then you can also add more filters afterwards

to get the position of the "non-space" element, simply reuse the list :

position = sed.split(" ").index([a for a in sed.split(" ") if a != ''][0])