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

Use Series.str.replace with regex for replacement, \s* is for possible spaces before (, then \(.*\) is for values () and values between | is for regex or and \d+ is for numbers with 1 or more digits:

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':['Bolivia (Plurinational State of)','Switzerland17']})

df['a'] = df['a'].str.replace('(\s*\(.*\)|\d+)','')
print (df)
             a
0      Bolivia
1  Switzerland