Filtering DataFrame by finding exact word (not combined) in a column of strings

Question

My DataFrame has two columns:

Name  Status
 a    I am Good
 b    Goodness!!!
 c    Good is what i feel
 d    Not Good-at-all

I want to filter rows in which Status has a string 'Good' as its exact word, not combined with any other words or characters.

So the output will be:

Name  Status
a    i am Good
c    Good is what i feel

Two other rows had a 'Good' string in it but mixed with other characters, so should not be picked up.

I tried doing:

d = df[df['Status'].str.contains('Good')]  # But all rows come up

I believe some regex like (r'\bGood\b', Status) will do that, but this is not able to sum it up together. And how/where exactly can I fit the regex in a DataFrame filter condition to achieve this? And how to achieve startswith or endswith 'Good' (exact word search)?

Answer 1

If you're defining "exact" to mean no other characters (including punctuation which defines a word boundary \b), you could instead check for a leading and trailing space and/or beginning/end anchors:

>>> df[df['Status'].str.contains(r'(?:\s|^)Good(?:\s|$)')]
  Name               Status
0    a            I am Good
2    c  Good is what i feel

Explanation:

• (?:\s|^) is a non-capturing group looking for a space character (\s) or the beginning of the string (^).

• Good is the word you're looking for.

• (?:\s|$) is a non-capturing group looking for a space character (\s) or the end of the string ($).