How to extract specific content in a pandas dataframe with a regex?

Question

Consider the following pandas dataframe:

In [114]:

df[\'movie_title\'].head()

​
Out[114]:

0     Toy Story (1995)
1     GoldenEye (1995)
2    Four Rooms (1         


        

Answer 1

Using regular expressions to find a year stored between parentheses. We specify the parantheses so we don't conflict with movies that have years in their titles

movies_df['year'] = movies_df.title.str.extract('(\(\d\d\d\d\))',expand=False)

Removing the parentheses:

movies_df['year'] = movies_df.year.str.extract('(\d\d\d\d)',expand=False)

Removing the years from the 'title' column:

movies_df['title'] = movies_df.title.str.replace('(\(\d\d\d\d\))', '')

Applying the strip function to get rid of any ending whitespace characters that may have appeared:

movies_df['title'] = movies_df['title'].apply(lambda x: x.strip())