Pandas replace/remove puncation from strings-CodePudding

What does this do in python?

 df['Name'].str.replace('\W', ' ')
 df['Name'].str.replace('_', ' ')
 df['Name'].str.replace('  ', ' ')

Does \W remove "=" from a string? I have a script and I'm trying to figure out where the "=", ",", and more get removed from my strings.

Can anyone explain what would remove this punctuation?

CodePudding user response：

The part of replacing with punctuation can also be performed using regex. In this, we replace all punctuation with an empty string using a certain regex

# Python3 code to demonstrate working of
# Removing punctuations in string
# Using regex
import re

# initializing string
test_str = "Gfg, is best : for ! Geeks ;"

# printing original string
print("The original string is : "   test_str)

# Removing punctuations in string
# Using regex
res = re.sub(r'[^\w\s]', '', test_str)

# printing result
print("The string after punctuation filter : "   res)

OR

# Python3 code to demonstrate working of
# Removing punctuations in string
# Using loop   punctuation string

# initializing string
test_str = "Gfg, is best : for ! Geeks ;"

# printing original string
print("The original string is : "   test_str)

# initializing punctuations string
punc = '''!()-[]{};:'"\,<>./?@#$%^&*_~'''

# Removing punctuations in string
# Using loop   punctuation string
for ele in test_str:
    if ele in punc:
        test_str = test_str.replace(ele, "")

# printing result
print("The string after punctuation filter : "   test_str)

CodePudding user response：

\W (upper case W) matches any non-word character. This means not only "=" is replaced but any non-word character, e.g. "%","&","§","/",...