pandas dataframe.replace regex

[metalray]

Dear Pandas Experts,
I am trying to replace occurences like "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" or "United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland"
with just "United Kingdom". So I thought I use a regex to look for strings that contain "United Kingdom".
However, my two attempts below do not work:

    dftwo['Country'].replace(r'^United Kingdom of Great Britain','United Kingdom',inplace=True, regex=True)

    dftwo['Country'].replace('/United Kingdom/','United Kingdom',inplace=True, regex=True)

I would really appreciate any help!

[zivoni]

You have no "wildcards" there

Output:
In [39]: import pandas as pd

In [40]: df = pd.DataFrame({"country":["United Kingdom of Great Britain", "Ireland", "United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland"], "value":[12,31, 43]})

In [41]: df
Out[41]: 
                                     country  value
0            United Kingdom of Great Britain     12
1                                    Ireland     31
2  United Kingdom of Great Britain & Ireland     43

In [42]: df.country.replace("^United Kingdom of Great Britain.*", "United Kingdom", regex=True, inplace=True)

In [43]: df
Out[43]: 
          country  value
0  United Kingdom     12
1         Ireland     31
2  United Kingdom     43

[metalray]

Hi zivoni!
Thank you so much. I had no idea that I could use a wild card there!

[zivoni]

"wildcard" is little vague   - pandas' replace is made on top of standard python re.sub, so you can use exactly same regular expressions you would use for re.sub and python re documentation is your friend.