python - Pandas: how to change all the values of a column?

Question

I have a data frame with a column called "Date" and want all the values from this column to have the same value (the year only). Example:

City     Date
Paris    01/04/2004
Lisbon   01/09/2004
Madrid   2004
Pekin    31/2004

What I want is:

City     Date
Paris    2004
Lisbon   2004
Madrid   2004
Pekin    2004

Here is my code:

fr61_70xls = pd.ExcelFile('AMADEUS FRANCE 1961-1970.xlsx')

#Here we import the individual sheets and clean the sheets    
years=(['1961','1962','1963','1964','1965','1966','1967','1968','1969','1970'])

fr={}

header=(['City','Country','NACE','Cons','Last_year','Op_Rev_EUR_Last_avail_yr','BvD_Indep_Indic','GUO_Name','Legal_status','Date_of_incorporation','Legal_status_date'])

for year in years:
    # save every sheet in variable fr['1961'], fr['1962'] and so on
    fr[year]=fr61_70xls.parse(year,header=0,parse_cols=10)
    fr[year].columns=header
    # drop the entire Legal status date column
    fr[year]=fr[year].drop(['Legal_status_date','Date_of_incorporation'],axis=1)
    # drop every row where GUO Name is empty
    fr[year]=fr[year].dropna(axis=0,how='all',subset=[['GUO_Name']])
    fr[year]=fr[year].set_index(['GUO_Name','Date_of_incorporation'])

It happens that in my DataFrames, called for example fr['1961'] the values of Date_of_incorporation can be anything (strings, integer, and so on), so maybe it would be best to completely erase this column and then attach another column with only the year to the DataFrames?

Answer 1

As @DSM points out, you can do this more directly using the vectorised string methods:

df['Date'].str[-4:].astype(int)

Or using extract (assuming there is only one set of digits of length 4 somewhere in each string):

df['Date'].str.extract('(?P<year>d{4})').astype(int)

An alternative slightly more flexible way, might be to use apply (or equivalently map) to do this:

df['Date'] = df['Date'].apply(lambda x: int(str(x)[-4:]))
             #  converts the last 4 characters of the string to an integer

The lambda function, is taking the input from the Date and converting it to a year.
You could (and perhaps should) write this more verbosely as:

def convert_to_year(date_in_some_format):
    date_as_string = str(date_in_some_format)  # cast to string
    year_as_string = date_in_some_format[-4:] # last four characters
    return int(year_as_string)

df['Date'] = df['Date'].apply(convert_to_year)

Perhaps 'Year' is a better name for this column...