Drop column that starts with

Question

I have a data frame that has multiple columns, example:

        Prod_A       Prod_B        Prod_C        State         Region
1          1           0             1             1              1

I would like to drop all columns that starts with Prod_, (I can't select or drop by name because the data frame has 200 variables) Is it possible to do this ?

Thank you

Answer 1

Use startswith for mask and then delete columns with loc and boolean indexing:

df = df.loc[:, ~df.columns.str.startswith('Prod')]
print (df)
   State  Region
1      1       1

Answer 2

First, select all columns to be deleted:

unwanted = df.columns[df.columns.str.startswith('Prod_')]

The, drop them all:

df.drop(unwanted, axis=1, inplace=True)

Answer 3

we can also use negative RegEx:

In [269]: df.filter(regex=r'^(?!Prod_).*$')
Out[269]:
   State  Region
1      1       1