Python Business Intelligence Cookbook

Removing whitespace in Pandas

It is very common to find whitespace at the beginning, the end, or the inside of a string, whether it's data in a CSV file or data from another source. Use the following recipe to create a custom function to remove the whitespace from every row of a column in a Pandas DataFrame.

Getting ready

Continue using the customers DataFrame you created earlier, or import the file into a new DataFrame.

How to do it…

def remove_whitespace(x):
    """
    Helper function to remove any blank space from a string
    x: a string
    """
    try:
        # Remove spaces inside of the string
        x = "".join(x.split())

    except:
        pass
    return x

customers.last_name = customers.last_name.apply(remove_whitespace)

How it works…

We first create a custom function named remove_whitespace() ...