I am working with a dataframe and the Pandas library and I would like to select all those rows of my payload column that its first two characters are "3c" and also those rows in which in this column its last two characters end in "3e".

I know that applying a conditional would be done in the following way,

new_df = df.loc[df['column'] == 'condition']]

And that you can search if a column contains a part of a string,

new_df = df[df[df['column']].str.contains('X', case=False)]

My question would be, how can I specify that I only want the first two characters? Is it possible to apply a logical OR and search the first two characters for a value and the last two for another value?

I have tried things similar to the following but I don't get what I want,

new_df= df[df['payload'][:2].str.contains('3c', case=False)]

Thank you very much!

CodePudding user response：

Chain both conditions by Series.str.startswith and Series.str.endswith by | for bitwise OR:

new_df = df[df['payload'].str.startswith('3c') | df['payload'].str.endswith('3e')]

If need both cases:

new_df = df[df['payload'].str.startswith(('3c', '3C')) | 
            df['payload'].str.endswith(('3e', '3E'))]

Your solution is possible modify by selecting by str for first or last 2 values:

df[df['payload'].str[:2].str.contains('3c', case=False) |
   df['payload'].str[-2:].str.contains('3e', case=False)