How do I add a column to dataframe on condition that certain observations in my dataframe contain a target word in Python?

Question

Here's what my data frame look like:

Number  Age      Famous_for                            
1       35       "businessman chairman of IBM (1973–1981)"
2       42       "musician (House of Freaks Gutterball)"
3       87       "baseball player (Oakland Athletics)"

I want to create additional column that will contain a dummy variable whether or not person was involved with entertaining business. Something like that:

Number..Age..................Famous_for.....................Entertaining                            
1.......35.......businessman chairman of IBM (1973–1981)........0              
2.......42.......musician (House of Freaks Gutterball)..........1                
3.......87.......baseball player (Oakland Athletics)............0       

How do I create a column based on the certain words in the famous for column (such as "musician", "club", "actor" and etc)? I tried the following:

df['entertaining'] = np.where(df['famous_for']>="musician", 1, 0)

but it wouldn't work. How can I do this in Python?

Answer 1

You can use str.contains on the DataFrame:

df = pd.DataFrame({'Age' : pd.Series([35,42,87], index=[1,2,3]),
        'Famous_for': pd.Series(['businessman chairman of IBM (1973–1981)',
                                 'musician (House of Freaks Gutterball)',
                                 'baseball player (Oakland Athletics)'], 
        index=[1,2,3])
        })

df['entertaining'] = df['Famous_for'].str.contains('musician')
print (df)

   Age                               Famous_for entertaining
1   35  businessman chairman of IBM (1973–1981)        False
2   42    musician (House of Freaks Gutterball)         True
3   87      baseball player (Oakland Athletics)        False

Note that str.contains also accepts a regular expression, so if you wish to search for various words you might use

df['entertaining'] = df['Famous_for'].str.contains('musician|businessman')