startswith() function in pandas – column starts with specific string in python dataframe

In this tutorial we will use startswith() function in pandas, to test whether the column starts with the specific string in python pandas dataframe. lets see an example of startswith() Function in pandas python

Create dataframe:

## create dataframe

import pandas as pd
d = {'Quarters' : ['quarter1','quarter2','quarter3','quarter4'],
     'Description' : ['First Quarter of the year', 'Second Quarter of the year', 'Third  Quarter of the year', 'Fourth Quarter of the year'],
     'Revenue':[23400344.567,54363744.678,56789117.456,4132454.987]}
df=pd.DataFrame(d)
print df	

resultant dataframe will be

Now let’s check whether the description column in the above dataframe starts with the String “First”.

#startswith function in python to check if the column starts with string "First" 

df['starts_with'] = map(lambda x: x.startswith('First'), df['Description'])
print df

If the string starts with First then it returns True. If not it returns False. So the resultant dataframe will be