Replace all occurrence of specific text in polars

replace_all

When working with text data, replacing characters with other characters is common. However, most replacements are applied only once. For example, if you have “barb” and replace “b” with “z”, you’ll get “zarb” instead of “zarz”. How can you ensure that you end up with “zarz” in polars?

Below is a dataframe showing phone numbers.

shape: (3, 2)

Name	Phone No
str	str
"Serena van der Wooodsen"	"222 333 4444"
"Blair Waldorf"	"333 444 5555"
"Dan Humphrey"	"666 777 8888"

Replace space with dash

To replace all spaces in each phone number with dashes, use the polars expression replace_all as follows:

(df
 .with_columns(pl.col('Phone No').str.replace_all(' ','-'))
 )

shape: (3, 2)

Name	Phone No
str	str
"Serena van der Wooodsen"	"222-333-4444"
"Blair Waldorf"	"333-444-5555"
"Dan Humphrey"	"666-777-8888"

Now you have dashes in the phone numbers instead of spaces!

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