How to extract or split characters from number strings using Pandas

Question

Hi, guys, I've been practicing my python skills mostly on pandas and I've been facing a problem. I have a data frame selected from an SQL table that looks like this

   id shares_float
0   1      621.76M
1   2      329.51M

in other word,

[(1, '621.76M'), (2, '329.51M')]

I want to split the shares_float so that if it is 'B', multiply 1,000,000,000 and if it is 'M', multiply 1,000,000 and if it is neither or doesn't have the trailing character just convert and assign the number.

The outcome should be a float type

   ticker_id  shares_float     float_value
0          1       621.76M    621760000.00
1          2         3.51B   3510000000.00

I am kind of a novice at pandas. Is there a way to do it in pandas? or should I convert data to list and do my manipulation in a loop and then convert it back to pandas DataFrame?

Answer 1

You could just simply use a conversion Dictionary

In [9]:

D={'M':'*1e6', 'B':'*1e9'}
df['float_value']=df.shares_float.apply(lambda x: eval(x[:-1]+D[x[-1]]))
In [10]:

print df
   ticker_id shares_float  float_value
0          1      621.76M   621760000
1          2        3.51B  3510000000

[2 rows x 3 columns]
In [11]:

df.dtypes
Out[11]:
ticker_id         int64
shares_float     object
float_value     float64
dtype: object