Pandas drop rows where column contains *

Question

I'm trying to drop all rows from this df where column 'DB Serial' contains the character *:

    DB Serial
0     13058
1     13069
2    *13070
3     13070
4     13044
5     13042

I am using:

df = df[~df['DB Serial'].str.contains('*')]

but i get this error:

    raise error, v # invalid expression
error: nothing to repeat

Answer 1

Escape * by \ because * is interpreted as regex:

'*' Causes the resulting RE to match 0 or more repetitions of the preceding RE

df = df[~df['DB Serial'].str.contains('\*')]
print (df)
  DB Serial
0     13058
1     13069
3     13070
4     13044
5     13042

If also get:

TypeError: bad operand type for unary ~: 'float'

then cast column to string, because mixed values - numeric with strings:

df = df[~df['DB Serial'].astype(str).str.contains('\*')]
print (df)
  DB Serial
0     13058
1     13069
3     13070
4     13044
5     13042

If possible NaNs values:

df = df[~df['DB Serial'].str.contains('\*', na=False)]