Concatenate values in a dataframe with value in preceding column on same row

I am trying to concatenate the values in a cell with values in its preceding cell on the same row i.e. one column before it throughout my dataframe. For sure, the first column values wont have anything to concatenate with. Also, my df has NaN values - which I have changed to None.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

CodePudding user response：

Try with add then cumsum

out = df.add('_').apply(lambda x : x[x.notna()].cumsum().str[:-1],axis=1)
Out[871]: 
   1    2      3        4          5
0  a  a_b  a_b_c  a_b_c_d  a_b_c_d_e
1  a  a_e  a_e_f      NaN        NaN

CodePudding user response：

# Constructing the dataframe:
df = pd.DataFrame({'l0': list('aaab'), 
                   'l1': list('begj'),
                   'l2': list('cfhk'),
                   'l3': ['d', np.nan, 'i', 'l'],
                   'l4': ['e', np.nan, np.nan, 'm']})

I am iterating through the columns one by one, using pandas.Series.str.cat, and replacing them in the original dataframe:

prev = df.iloc[:, 0]

for col in df.columns[1:]:
    prev = prev.str.cat(df[col], sep='_')
    df[col] = prev