searching matching string pattern from dataframe column in python pandas

Question

i have a data-frame like below

 name         genre
 satya      |ACTION|DRAMA|IC|
 satya      |COMEDY|BIOPIC|SOCIAL|
 abc        |CLASSICAL|
 xyz        |ROMA         


        

Answer 1

I think you can add \ to regex for escaping , because | without \ is interpreted as OR:

'|'

A|B, where A and B can be arbitrary REs, creates a regular expression that will match either A or B. An arbitrary number of REs can be separated by the '|' in this way. This can be used inside groups (see below) as well. As the target string is scanned, REs separated by '|' are tried from left to right. When one pattern completely matches, that branch is accepted. This means that once A matches, B will not be tested further, even if it would produce a longer overall match. In other words, the '|' operator is never greedy. To match a literal '|', use \|, or enclose it inside a character class, as in [|].

print df['genre'].str.contains(u'\|IC\|')
0     True
1    False
2    False
3    False
4     True
5     True
Name: genre, dtype: bool

print df[df['genre'].str.contains(u'\|IC\|')]
    name                        genre
0  satya            |ACTION|DRAMA|IC|
4    def  |DISCOVERY|SPORT|COMEDY|IC|
5    ghj                         |IC|