I want to output the following table in pandas. I only have the description column so far but I want to split on the comma and output the contents before the comma in the commondescrip column.

I have the description column right now, I need the commondescrip column

I tried

splitword = df2["description"].str.split(",", n=1, expand = True)
df2["commondescrip"] = splitword[0]

but it gives me NaN for those rows that have Area.

How can I fix it so that I can achieve the above the table and split it to output before the comma?

>Solution :

Don’t split, this would require to handle several parts while you’re only interested in one: remove or extract.

removing everything after the first comma:

df['commondescrip'] = df['description'].str.replace(',.*', '', regex=True)

or extracting everything before the first comma:

df['commondescrip'] = df['description'].str.extract('([^,]+)')

output:

    description commondescrip
0         00001         00001
1         00002         00002
2  00003,Area01         00003
3         00004         00004
4  00005,Area02         00005