how to check if a value exists in a dataframe

Question

hi I am trying to get the column name of a dataframe which contains a specific word,

eg: i have a dataframe,

NA              good    employee
Not available   best    employer
not required    well    manager
not eligible    super   reportee

my_word=["well"]

how to check if "well" exists in a df and the column name which has "well"

thanks in Advance!

Answer 1

Use DataFrame.isin for check all columns and DataFrame.any for check at least one True per row:

m = df.isin(my_word).any()
print (m)
0    False
1     True
2    False
dtype: bool

And then get columns names by filtering:

cols = m.index[m].tolist()
print(cols)
[1]

Data:

print (df)
               0      1         2
0            NaN   good  employee
1  Not available   best  employer
2   not required   well   manager
3   not eligible  super  reportee

Detail:

print (df.isin(my_word))
       0      1      2
0  False  False  False
1  False  False  False
2  False   True  False
3  False  False  False

print (df.isin(my_word).any())
0    False
1     True
2    False
dtype: bool

EDIT After converting get nested lists, so flattening is necessary:

my_word=["well","manager"]

m = df.isin(my_word).any()
print (m)
0    False
1     True
2     True
dtype: bool

nested = df.loc[:,m].values.tolist()
flat_list = [item for sublist in nested for item in sublist]
print (flat_list)
['good', 'employee', 'best', 'employer', 'well', 'manager', 'super', 'reportee']