how to do a left,right and mid of a string in a pandas dataframe

Question

in a pandas dataframe how can I apply a sort of excel left(\'state\',2) to only take the first two letters. Ideally I want to learn how to use left,right and mid in a datafr

Answer 1

With regards to the mid, probably a short cut code would be df['state'].str[3,5]

this will start from the 3rd character and give you the 3rd and 4th character of the string.