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

I think you want to use the replace() method that strings have, it's orders of magnitude faster than using regular expressions (I just checked quickly in IPython):

%timeit mystr.replace("ello", "")
The slowest run took 7.64 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached 
1000000 loops, best of 3: 250 ns per loop

%timeit re.sub("ello","", "e")
The slowest run took 21.03 times longer than the fastest. This could mean that an intermediate result is being cached 
1000000 loops, best of 3: 4.7 µs per loop

If you need further speed improvements after that, you should look into numpy's vectorize function (but I think the speed up from using replace instead of regular expressions should be pretty substantial).