Fill empty cells in column with value of other columns

python pandas na
alpenmilch411 picture alpenmilch411 · Apr 29, 2016 · Viewed 14.3k times · Source

I have a HC list in which every entry should have an ID, but some entries do not have an ID. I would like to fill those empty cells by combining the the first name column and the last name column. How would I go about this? I tried googling for fillna and the like but couldn't get it to work. What I want is basically this:

If hc["ID"] == "": 
    hc["ID"] = hc["First Name"] + hc["Last Name"]

Answer

EdChum picture EdChum · Apr 29, 2016

You can use loc and a boolean mask if NaN then:

hc.loc[hc["ID"].isnull(),'ID'] = hc["First Name"] + hc["Last Name"]

otherwise for empty string:

hc.loc[hc["ID"] == '','ID'] = hc["First Name"] + hc["Last Name"]

Related questions

Convert Pandas column containing NaNs to dtype `int`

I read data from a .csv file to a Pandas dataframe as below. For one of the columns, namely id, I want to specify the column type as int. The problem is the id series has missing/empty values. When …

Read More
specifying "skip NA" when calculating mean of the column in a data frame created by Pandas

I am learning Pandas package by replicating the outing from some of the R vignettes. Now I am using the dplyr package from R as an example: http://cran.rstudio.com/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/introduction.html R script planes &…

Read More
Selecting pandas cells with None value

I have a column of a pandas dataframe that I got from a database query with blank cells. The blank cells become "None" and I want to check if each of the rows is None: In [325]: yes_records_sample['name'] …

Read More