Select only a part of the Dataframe title

Question

Imagine the following situation, I have a Dataframe with any name. Within this Dataframe I have columns with the following titles More(abc), Less(abc), Sub(abc), following the data of each column. The name abc refers to abc data, I also have More(dfg), Less(dfg), Sub(dfg).

How do I create a function that keeps the data of each column, but when printing this data I change the column names only to abc ? That is by removing More, Less and Sub.

Thus the result would be abc plus the data and dfg plus the data, removing the More, Less, Sub and also the ().

Answer 1

If we did this:

import pandas as pd
dicio = {"Mais(abc)":[1,2,3],"Menos(abc)":[4,5,6], "Sub(abc)":[7,8,9], 
         "Mais(dfg)":[10,11,12], "Menos(dfg)":[13,14,15], "Sub(dfg)":[16,17,18]}
df = pd.DataFrame(dicio)

The table in df will be

    Mais(abc)   Menos(abc)  Sub(abc)    Mais(dfg)   Menos(dfg)  Sub(dfg)
0   1           4           7           10          13          16
1   2           5           8           11          14          17
2   3           6           9           12          15          18

To rename the columns then do the following:

new_columns_names = ['abc', 'abc', 'abc', 'dfg', 'dfg', 'dfg']
df.columns = new_columns_names

The exit will be:

    abc         abc         abc         dfg         dfg         dfg
0   1           4           7           10          13          16
1   2           5           8           11          14          17
2   3           6           9           12          15          18

Answer 2

The best way to solve this problem is by using regex (regular expressions):

import re

df.rename(columns=lambda x: 
             re.search(r"\((.*?)\)", x).group(1) if re.search(r"\((.*?)\)", x) else x)

EDIT:

In this case the expression \((.*?)\) does the following search:

\( - Find the opening of parentheses

(.*?) - First capture group (i.e., everything within parentheses)

\) - Find the parenthesis closure