Find Values in a Pandas Series

Understand how to use find and any in a Pandas series.

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Try it yourself

Try executing the code below to see the result.

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import pandas as pd
heros = pd.Series(['Batman', 'Wonder Woman', 'Superman'])
if heros.str.find('Iron Man').any():
  print('Wrong universe')
else:
  print('DC')

Python’s str.find documentation says the following:

“Return the lowest index in the string where substring sub is found within the slice s[start:end]. Optional arguments start and end are interpreted as in slice notation. Return -1 if sub is not found.”

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str1 = "Hello world"
print(str1.find("world")) #returns 6 as w is located at index 6
print(str1.find("hey")) #returns -1 as it doesn't exist in the string

In the Rectified puzzle, we saw that except for zeros, the Boolean values of all numbers are True. When you run this code below, the pandas.Series.any method will return True if at least one of the values in the series is True:

In [1]: heros.str.find('Iron Man')
Out[1]:
0 -1
1 -1
2 -1
dtype: int64

Since we have -1 as values, any will return True. One way to solve this is to use the == operator:

In [2]: (heros == 'Iron Man').any()
Out[2]: False

Solution

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import pandas as pd
heros = pd.Series(['Batman', 'Wonder Woman', 'Superman'])
if (heros == 'Iron Man').any():
  print('Wrong universe')
else:
  print('DC')

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