remove characters from pandas column

pandas, python, regex

Solution

Working example

df = pd.DataFrame(dict(location=['(hello)']))

print(df)

  location
0  (hello)

@Psidom's Solution `str.strip`

df.location.str.strip('()')

0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 2 `str.extract`

df.location.str.extract('\((.*)\)', expand=False)

0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 3 `str.replace`

df.location.str.replace('\(|\)', '')

0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Option 4 `replace`

df.location.replace('\(|\)', '', regex=True)

0    hello
Name: location, dtype: object

Problem

I'm trying to simply remove the '(' and ')' from the beginning and end of the pandas column series. This is my best guess so far but it just returns empty strings with () intact. ``` postings['location'].replace('[^\(.*\)?]','', regex=True) ``` The column looks like this: screenshot of jupyter notebook

Original source