pandas: best way to select all columns whose names start with X

Question

I have a DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

df = pd.DataFrame({\'foo.aa\': [1, 2.1, np.nan, 4.7, 5.6, 6.8],
                   \'foo.fighters         


        

Answer 1

Based on @EdChum's answer, you can try the following solution:

df[df.columns[pd.Series(df.columns).str.contains("foo")]]

This will be really helpful in case not all the columns you want to select start with foo. This method selects all the columns that contain the substring foo and it could be placed in at any point of a column's name.

In essence, I replaced .startswith() with .contains().