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

def madd(x):
    """Performs element-wise string concatenation with multiple input arrays.

    Args:
        x: iterable of np.array.

    Returns: np.array.
    """
    for i, arr in enumerate(x):
        if type(arr.item(0)) is not str:
            x[i] = x[i].astype(str)
    return reduce(np.core.defchararray.add, x)

For example:

data = list(zip([2000]*4, ['q1', 'q2', 'q3', 'q4']))
df = pd.DataFrame(data=data, columns=['Year', 'quarter'])
df['period'] = madd([df[col].values for col in ['Year', 'quarter']])

df

    Year    quarter period
0   2000    q1  2000q1
1   2000    q2  2000q2
2   2000    q3  2000q3
3   2000    q4  2000q4