Join Pandas DataFrames matching by substring

Prerequisites: Pandas

In this article, we will learn how to join two Data Frames matching by substring with python. 

Functions used:

• join(): joins all the elements in an iteration into a single string
• lambda(): an anonymous method which is declared without a name and can accept any number of parameters
• find(): gets the initial appearance of any requisite value
• merge(): merges two dataframes

Approach

Follow the below steps to join two data frames matched by substring.

• Create two DataFrames.
• Join two dataframes using cartesian product
• Join a duplicate column including equal values in all the DataFrames
• Join the new column
• At last, remove the added column in each DataFrame.
• Then we need to add a new column to the Data frame. To do this we will use the "lambda" along with "find" functions where the output is greater than zero.
• Now we print the joined data frames matched by substrings .

Below is the implementation.

import pandas as pd


dataFrame1 = pd.DataFrame([['PQR', 'B1'], ['QRS', 'B2'], ['RDE', 'B3']], 
                          columns=['work_name', 'tag_name'])

dataFrame2 = pd.DataFrame([['RR', 'T1'], ['QR', 'T2'], ['HG', 'T3'], 
                           ['PQ', 'T4']],
                          columns=['sub_work_name', 'extra_tag_value'])

dataFrame1['join'] = 1
dataFrame2['join'] = 1

dataFrameFull = dataFrame1.merge(
  dataFrame2, on='join').drop('join', axis=1)

dataFrame2.drop('join', axis=1, inplace=True)

dataFrameFull['match'] = dataFrameFull.apply(
    lambda x: x.work_name.find(x.sub_work_name), axis=1).ge(0)

print(dataFrameFull[dataFrameFull['match']])

Output: