Split Pandas Column by values that are in a list - python-2.7

Question

I have three lists that look like this:
age = ['51+', '21-30', '41-50', '31-40', '<21']
cluster = ['notarget', 'cluster3', 'allclusters', 'cluster1', 'cluster2']
device = ['htc_one_2gb','iphone_6/6+_at&t','iphone_6/6+_vzn','iphone_6/6+_all_other_devices','htc_one_2gb_limited_time_offer','nokia_lumia_v3','iphone5s','htc_one_1gb','nokia_lumia_v3_more_everything']
I also have column in a df that looks like this:
campaign_name
0 notarget_<21_nokia_lumia_v3
1 htc_one_1gb_21-30_notarget
2 41-50_htc_one_2gb_cluster3
3 <21_htc_one_2gb_limited_time_offer_notarget
4 51+_cluster3_iphone_6/6+_all_other_devices
I want to split the column into three separate columns based on the values in the above lists. Like so:
age cluster device
0 <21 notarget nokia_lumia_v3
1 21-30 notarget htc_one_1gb
2 41-50 cluster3 htc_one_2gb
3 <21 notarget htc_one_2gb_limited_time_offer
4 51+ cluster3 iphone_6/6+_all_other_devices
First thought was to do a simple test like this:
ages_list = []
for i in ages:
if i in df['campaign_name'][0]:
ages_list.append(i)
print ages_list
>>> ['<21']
I was then going to convert ages_list to a series and combine it with the remaining two to get the end result above but i assume there is a more pythonic way of doing it?

Answer 1

the idea behind this is that you'll create a regular expression based on the values you already have , for example if you want to build a regular expressions that capture any value from your age list you may do something like this '|'.join(age) and so on for all the values you already have cluster & device.
a special case for device list becuase it contains + sign that will conflict with the regex ( because + means one or more when it comes to regex ) so we can fix this issue by replacing any value of + with \+ , so this mean I want to capture literally +
df = pd.DataFrame({'campaign_name' : ['notarget_<21_nokia_lumia_v3' , 'htc_one_1gb_21-30_notarget' , '41-50_htc_one_2gb_cluster3' , '<21_htc_one_2gb_limited_time_offer_notarget' , '51+_cluster3_iphone_6/6+_all_other_devices'] })
def split_df(df):
campaign_name = df['campaign_name']
df['age'] = re.findall('|'.join(age) , campaign_name)[0]
df['cluster'] = re.findall('|'.join(cluster) , campaign_name)[0]
df['device'] = re.findall('|'.join([x.replace('+' , '\+') for x in device ]) , campaign_name)[0]
return df
df.apply(split_df, axis = 1 )
if you want to drop the original column you can do this
df.apply(split_df, axis = 1 ).drop( 'campaign_name', axis = 1)
Here I'm assuming that a value must be matched by regex but if this is not the case you can do your checks , you got the idea