Selecting pandas dataframe columns whose names are like strings in list

Question

Let's say I have a pandas DataFrame, df, as shown below and a list, l, also shown below. I want to select the columns from df for which any of the column names start with the strings in l. So in this case I want to get df[['word', 'hello1', 'hello2', 'hello3']]. Is there a quick way I can do this? I could loop through each element of the list but that could take a lot of time for larger DataFrames.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({
    'word': [13,4],
    'another': [1,4],
    'champ': [1,5],
    'hello1': [1,2],
    'hello2': [4,5],
    'hello3': [7,8]
})

l = ['word', 'hello']

#what I want to get:
   word  hello1 hello2  hello3
0   13      1      4    7
1   4       2      5    8

Quang Hoang · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-28 19:55:15Z

2

Since you want the column starting with given words, you can do:

df.loc[:, df.columns.str.match(f'^({"|".join(l)})')]

Output:

   word  hello1  hello2  hello3
0    13       1       4       7
1     4       2       5       8

answered Oct 28, 2019 at 19:55

Quang Hoang

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Adam Zeldin · Accepted Answer · 2019-10-28 19:54:51Z

1

Try this:

df.loc[:,df.columns.str.startswith(tuple(l))]

answered Oct 28, 2019 at 19:54

Adam Zeldin

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