How to remove curly braces, apostrophes and square brackets from dictionaries in a Pandas dataframe (Python)

Question

I have the following data in a csv file:

from StringIO import StringIO
import pandas as pd

the_data = \"\"\"
ABC,2016-6-9 0:00,95,{\'//PurpleCar\': [115L],          


        

Answer 1

I think it's better to conver the strings into two columns:

from io import StringIO
import pandas as pd


df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(the_data), sep=',', header=None)
df.columns = ['Company','Date','Volume','Car1','Car2','Car3','Car4']

cars = ["Car1", "Car2", "Car3", "Car4"]
pattern = r"//(?P.+?)':.*?(?P\d+)"
df2 = pd.concat([df[col].str
                    .extract(pattern)
                    .assign(value=lambda self: pd.to_numeric(self["value"]))
                    for col in cars],
                axis=1, keys=cars)

the result:

        Car1             Car2           Car3                Car4      
       color value      color value    color value         color value
0  PurpleCar   115  YellowCar   403  BlueCar    16  WhiteCar-XYZ     0
1  PurpleCar   219  YellowCar   381  BlueCar    90  WhiteCar-XYZ     0
2  PurpleCar   817  YellowCar    21  BlueCar    31  WhiteCar-XYZ     0
3  PurpleCar    80  YellowCar  2011  BlueCar  8888  WhiteCar-XYZ     0
4  PurpleCar    32  YellowCar    15  BlueCar     4  WhiteCar-XYZ     0
5  PurpleCar    32   BlackCar    15  PinkCar     4  NPO-GreenCar     0
6  PurpleCar    32   BlackCar    15  PinkCar     4  NPO-GreenCar     0
7  PurpleCar    32   BlackCar    15  PinkCar     4  NPO-GreenCar     0
8  PurpleCar    32   BlackCar    15  PinkCar     4  NPO-GreenCar     0
9  PurpleCar    32   BlackCar    15  PinkCar     4  NPO-GreenCar     0