Pandas: Grouping rows by list in CSV file? - regex

Question

In an effort to make our budgeting life a bit easier and help myself learn; I am creating a small program in python that takes data from our exported bank csv.
I will give you an example of what I want to do with this data. Say I want to group all of my fast food expenses together. There are many different names with different totals in the description column but I want to see it all tabulated as one "Fast Food " expense.
For instance the Csv is setup like this:
Date Description Debit Credit
1/20/20 POS PIN BLAH BLAH ### 1.75 NaN
I figured out how to group them with an or statement:
contains = df.loc[df['Description'].str.contains('food court|whataburger', flags = re.I, regex = True)]
I ultimately would like to have it read off of a list? I would like to group all my expenses into categories and check those category variable names so that it would only output from that list.
I tried something like:
fast_food = ['Macdonald', 'Whataburger', 'pizza hut']
That obviously didn't work.
If there is a better way of doing this I am wide open to suggestions.
Also I have looked through quite a few posts here on stack and have yet to find the answer (although I am sure I overlooked it)
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am still learning.
Thanks

Answer 1

You can assign a new column using str.extract and then groupby:
df = pd.DataFrame({"description":['Macdonald something', 'Whataburger something', 'pizza hut something',
'Whataburger something','Macdonald something','Macdonald otherthing',],
"debit":[1.75,2.0,3.5,4.5,1.5,2.0]})
fast_food = ['Macdonald', 'Whataburger', 'pizza hut']
df["found"] = df["description"].str.extract(f'({"|".join(fast_food)})',flags=re.I)
print (df.groupby("found").sum())
#
debit
found
Macdonald 5.25
Whataburger 6.50
pizza hut 3.50

Answer 2

Use dynamic pattern building:
fast_food = ['Macdonald', 'Whataburger', 'pizza hut']
pattern = r"\b(?:{})\b".format("|".join(map(re.escape, fast_food)))
contains = df.loc[df['Description'].str.contains(pattern, flags = re.I, regex = True)]
The \b word boundaries find whole words, not partial words.
The re.escape will protect special characters and they will be parsed as literal characters.
If \b does not work for you, check other approaches at Match a whole word in a string using dynamic regex