How to remove colon in python

I have a column named "Start Time" is it a string and it displays the time as 11:20:15. I want to have the time in the format 112015. So I need to replace the colon.

I have tried:

["Start Time"] = df["Start Time"].replace(":","", regex=True)

But that didn't work. It didn't give an error either but the time remains 11:20:15.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

asked Jan 13, 2020 at 9:30

3

You need to add .str to handle each value as a str and apply .replace() (documentation) :

df["Start Time"] = df["Start Time"].str.replace(":","")

answered Jan 13, 2020 at 9:32

F BlanchetF Blanchet

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Is the df["Start Time"] column a string datatype? Often pandas will read in dates as datetime objects. You can check this by printing df.dtypes and see if it says object for this column.

Then I'd recommend using df.strftime (string formatter) as done here: How to change the datetime format in pandas if you really want the string in the format you mentioned.

answered Jan 13, 2020 at 9:37

LourensLourens

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3

Looks like you have a datatime object in Start Time column. Use dt.strftime(%H%M%S)

Ex:

df["Start Time"].dt.strftime(%H%M%S)

answered Jan 13, 2020 at 9:57

RakeshRakesh

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When I did:

df['Start Time'] = df['Start Time'].astype(str)

And then:

["Start Time"] = df["Start Time"].replace(":","", regex=True)

It worked perfectly. Thank you all for thinking with me!

answered Jan 18, 2020 at 17:39

Sj03rdSj03rd

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Sometimes we want to remove all occurrences of a character from a string. There are two common ways to achieve this.

Python Remove Character from String

1. Using string replace() function
2. Using string translate() function

Python Remove Character from String using replace()

We can use string replace() function to replace a character with a new character. If we provide an empty string as the second argument, then the character will get removed from the string. Note that the string is immutable in Python, so this function will return a new string and the original string will remain unchanged.

s = 'abc12321cba'

print(s.replace('a', ''))

Output: bc12321cb

Python Remove Character from String using translate()

Python string translate() function replace each character in the string using the given translation table. We have to specify the Unicode code point for the character and ‘None’ as a replacement to remove it from the result string. We can use ord() function to get the Unicode code point of a character.

s = 'abc12321cba'

print(s.translate({ord('a'): None}))

Output: bc12321cb If you want to replace multiple characters, that can be done easily using an iterator. Let’s see how to remove characters ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ from a string.

s = 'abc12321cba'

print(s.translate({ord(i): None for i in 'abc'}))

Output: 12321

Removing Spaces from a String

s = ' 1 2 3 4 '
print(s.replace(' ', ''))  # 1234
print(s.translate({ord(i): None for i in ' '}))  # 1234

Python Remove newline from String

s = 'ab\ncd\nef'
print(s.replace('\n', ''))
print(s.translate({ord('\n'): None}))

Remove substring from string

String replace() function arguments is string. Let’s see how to remove a word from a string.

s = 'ab12abc34ba'
print(s.replace('ab', ''))

Output: 12c34ba

Remove specified number of times

We can also pass a third parameter in replace() function to specify the number of times replacement should be performed.

s = 'abababab'
print(s.replace('a', 'A', 2))

Output: AbAbabab

You can checkout complete python script and more Python examples from our GitHub Repository.

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