Drop columns whose name contains a specific string from pandas DataFrame

Question

I have a pandas dataframe with the following column names:

Result1, Test1, Result2, Test2, Result3, Test3, etc...

I want to drop all the columns whose name c

Answer 1

Cheaper, Faster, and Idiomatic: str.contains

In recent versions of pandas, you can use string methods on the index and columns. Here, str.startswith seems like a good fit.

To remove all columns starting with a given substring:

df.columns.str.startswith('Test')
# array([ True, False, False, False])

df.loc[:,~df.columns.str.startswith('Test')]

  toto test2 riri
0    x     x    x
1    x     x    x

---

For case-insensitive matching, you can use regex-based matching with str.contains with an SOL anchor:

df.columns.str.contains('^test', case=False)
# array([ True, False,  True, False])

df.loc[:,~df.columns.str.contains('^test', case=False)] 

  toto riri
0    x    x
1    x    x

if mixed-types is a possibility, specify na=False as well.