Combine two columns of text in pandas dataframe

Question

I have a 20 x 4000 dataframe in Python using pandas. Two of these columns are named Year and quarter. I\'d like to create a variable called p

Answer 1

Using zip could be even quicker:

df["period"] = [''.join(i) for i in zip(df["Year"].map(str),df["quarter"])]

Graph:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import timeit
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from collections import defaultdict

df = pd.DataFrame({'Year': ['2014', '2015'], 'quarter': ['q1', 'q2']})

myfuncs = {
"df['Year'].astype(str) + df['quarter']":
    lambda: df['Year'].astype(str) + df['quarter'],
"df['Year'].map(str) + df['quarter']":
    lambda: df['Year'].map(str) + df['quarter'],
"df.Year.str.cat(df.quarter)":
    lambda: df.Year.str.cat(df.quarter),
"df.loc[:, ['Year','quarter']].astype(str).sum(axis=1)":
    lambda: df.loc[:, ['Year','quarter']].astype(str).sum(axis=1),
"df[['Year','quarter']].astype(str).sum(axis=1)":
    lambda: df[['Year','quarter']].astype(str).sum(axis=1),
    "df[['Year','quarter']].apply(lambda x : '{}{}'.format(x[0],x[1]), axis=1)":
    lambda: df[['Year','quarter']].apply(lambda x : '{}{}'.format(x[0],x[1]), axis=1),
    "[''.join(i) for i in zip(dataframe['Year'].map(str),dataframe['quarter'])]":
    lambda: [''.join(i) for i in zip(df["Year"].map(str),df["quarter"])]
}

d = defaultdict(dict)
step = 10
cont = True
while cont:
    lendf = len(df); print(lendf)
    for k,v in myfuncs.items():
        iters = 1
        t = 0
        while t < 0.2:
            ts = timeit.repeat(v, number=iters, repeat=3)
            t = min(ts)
            iters *= 10
        d[k][lendf] = t/iters
        if t > 2: cont = False
    df = pd.concat([df]*step)

pd.DataFrame(d).plot().legend(loc='upper center', bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, -0.15))
plt.yscale('log'); plt.xscale('log'); plt.ylabel('seconds'); plt.xlabel('df rows')
plt.show()