Use a list with function names to iteratively apply over a dataframe column-CodePudding

Context: I'm allowing a user to add specific methods for a cleaning process pipeline (appended to a main list with all the methods chosen). Each element from this list is the name of a function.

My quesiton is:

Why does this work:

dataframe[cleanedCol] =dataframe[colToClean].apply(replace_contractions).apply(remove_links).apply(remove_emails)

But something like this doesn't?

pipeline = ['replace_contractions','remove_links','remove_emails']
for method in pipeline:
     dataframe[cleanedColumn] = dataframe[columnToClean].apply(method)

How could I iteratively apply each one of the methods from the list (by the order they are in the list) to the dataframe column?

Thank you in advance!

CodePudding user response：

You would either have to convert those strings to actual function objects or even better just store the function objects instead of the names as strings

pipeline = [replace_contractions, remove_links, remove_emails]
for method in pipeline:
     dataframe[cleanedColumn] = dataframe[columnToClean].apply(method)