Remove unwanted parts from strings in a column

Question

I am looking for an efficient way to remove unwanted parts from strings in a DataFrame column.

Data looks like:

    time    result
1    09:00   +52A
         


        

Answer 1

There's a bug here: currently cannot pass arguments to str.lstrip and str.rstrip:

http://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/2411

EDIT: 2012-12-07 this works now on the dev branch:

In [8]: df['result'].str.lstrip('+-').str.rstrip('aAbBcC')
Out[8]: 
1     52
2     62
3     44
4     30
5    110
Name: result