Python Pandas removing substring using another column

Question

I\'ve tried searching around and can\'t figure out an easy way to do this, so I\'m hoping your expertise can help.

I have a pandas data frame with two columns

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Answer 1

Here is one solution that is quite a bit faster than your current solution, I'm not convinced that there wouldn't be something faster though

In [13]: import numpy as np
         import pandas as pd
         n = 1000
         testing  = pd.DataFrame({'NAME':[
         'FIRST', np.nan, 'NAME2', 'NAME3', 
         'NAME4', 'NAME5', 'NAME6']*n, 'FULL_NAME':['FIRST LAST', np.nan, 'FIRST  LAST', 'FIRST NAME3', 'FIRST NAME4 LAST', 'ANOTHER NAME', 'LAST NAME']*n})

This is kind of a long one liner but it should do what you need

Fasted solution I can come up with is using replace as mentioned in another answer:

In [37]: %timeit testing ['NEW2'] = [e.replace(k, '') for e, k in zip(testing.FULL_NAME.astype('str'), testing.NAME.astype('str'))]
100 loops, best of 3: 4.67 ms per loop

Original answer:

In [14]: %timeit testing ['NEW'] = [''.join(str(e).split(k)) for e, k in zip(testing.FULL_NAME.astype('str'), testing.NAME.astype('str'))]
100 loops, best of 3: 7.24 ms per loop

compared to your current solution:

In [16]: %timeit testing['NEW1'] = testing.apply(address_remove, axis=1)
10 loops, best of 3: 166 ms per loop

These get you the same answer as your current solution