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I have a dataframe where one of the columns consist of arrays. I need to extract first element from each array in this column. So, for the first row it would be 'classical harp', for 2nd - 'classic persian pop' etc. Here is an example:

enter image description here

And my code below. I tried using lambda along with apply or assign but it doesn't work - I mean I can't take first element of each array in a column:

df = df.assign(top_genre = lambda x: x['genres'][0])
df['new'] = df['genres'].apply(lambda x: x[0])

How to amend my code to make it work properly?

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    df['new'] = df['genres'].str[0] Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 14:49
  • can I use lambda in this case? if so what's wrong with my code? Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 14:56
  • hard to debug your code with an image as input, you must provide a reproducible input Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 15:01
  • I tried it with my dataset (genres column): kaggle.com/datasets/lehaknarnauli/…. However, I got error. Don't know how to overcome it Commented Dec 27, 2022 at 17:30

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with lambda u can use

df['new'] = df['genres'].apply(lambda x: x.str[0])
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2 Comments

it doesn't work with my dataset, it's publicly available: kaggle.com/datasets/lehaknarnauli/…. I can't retrieve first element from 'genres' column. I tried your code and get 'str' object has no attribute 'str' error. I also tried this: df['new'] = df['genres'].apply(lambda x: '[]' if not x else x[0]) - unfortunately I got [ as an outcome. Do you know why it happens?
can your print df['genres'] to see because it work for me

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