Dropping duplicate records ignoring case

Question

I have a data frame with with several columns, one of which is company_name. I'm trying to remove duplicate records based on them having the same company_name, but I'm at a loss on how to do this while maintaining the original case of the company_name.

I've tried converting all names to lowercase and then removing duplicates, but as mentioned before I would like to maintain the original case.

df = pd.DataFrame({'company_name': ['Apple', 'apple', 'BlackBerry', 'blackberry','Blackberry'])
df['company_name'] = df['company_name'].str.strip()
df['company_name'] = df['company_name'].str.lower()
input_records.drop_duplicates(subset=['company_id'], inplace=True, 
   keep="first")

this code gets rid of duplicates, but stores the company name in all lowercase.

Desired result

company_name
Apple
BlackBerry

Actual result

company_name
apple
blackberry

Answer 1

You could create a new column where you do your operations. This will allow you to keep the company name column untouched.

Here is what it could look like :

df = pd.DataFrame({'company_name':['Apple','apple','Blackberry','blackberry']})

company_name
0        Apple
1        apple
2   Blackberry
3   blackberry

df['company_name_2'] = df['company_name'].str.strip()
df['company_name_2'] = df['company_name_2'].str.lower()
df.drop_duplicates(subset=['company_name_2'], inplace=True, 
   keep="first")
df.drop(columns = 'company_name_2', inplace = True)
df.reset_index(inplace = True, drop = True)

Out :

    company_name
0   Apple
1   Blackberry

Answer 2

How about using duplicated

yourdf=df[~df.company_name.str.strip().str.lower().duplicated(keep='first')]
yourdf
Out[415]: 
  company_name
0        Apple
2   BlackBerry