Removing substring of from a list of strings

Question

There are several countries with numbers and/or parenthesis in my list. How I remove these?

e.g.

\'Bolivia (Plurinational State of)\' should be \'Bolivi

Answer 1

Run just:

df.Country.replace(r'\d+|\s*\([^)]*\)', '', regex=True, inplace=True)

Assuming that the initial content of your DataFrame is:

                            Country
0  Bolivia (Plurinational State of)
1                     Switzerland17
2                    United Kingdom

after the above replace you will have:

          Country
0         Bolivia
1     Switzerland
2  United Kingdom

The above pattern contains:

• the first alternative - a non-empty sequence of digits,
• the second alternative:
  • an optional sequence of "white" chars,
  • an opening parenthesis (quoted),
  • a sequence of chars other than ) (between brackets no quotation is needed),
  • a closing parenthesis (also quoted).