USING LIKE inside pandas.query()

Question

I have been using Pandas for more than 3 months and I have an fair idea about the dataframes accessing and querying etc.

I have got an requirement wherein I wanted t

Answer 1

A trick I just came up with for "starts with":

pandas.query('"abc" <= column_name <= "abc~"')

Explanation: pandas accepts "greater" and "less than" statements for strings in a query, so anything starting with "abc" will be greater or equal to "abc" in the lexicographic order. The tilde (~) is the largest character in the ASCII table, so anything starting with "abc" will be less than or equal to "abc~".

A few things to take into consideration:

• This is of course case sensitive. All lower case characters come after all upper cases characters in the ASCII table.
• This won't work fully for Unicode strings, but the general principle should be the same.
• I couldn't come up with parallel tricks for "contains" or "ends with".