Removing characters from columns in data frame

[zivoni]

For me it works quite well.

Output:
In [4]: a = '"{u\'type\': u\'Point\', u\'coordinates\': [43.18040111, -79.02213645]}"'

In [5]: df = pd.DataFrame({"geo":[eval(a)]})

In [6]: df
Out[6]: 
                                                 geo
0  {u'type': u'Point', u'coordinates': [43.180401...

In [7]: repr(df.geo[0])
Out[7]: '"{u\'type\': u\'Point\', u\'coordinates\': [43.18040111, -79.02213645]}"'

In [8]: pattern = r".*\[(-*\d+\.\d+), (-*\d+\.\d+)\].*"

In [9]: df['long'] = np.float(df.geo.str.replace(pattern, r"\1"))

In [10]: df
Out[10]: 
                                                 geo       long
0  {u'type': u'Point', u'coordinates': [43.180401...  43.180401

It looks that your string is actually representation of geo dictionary, it would be easier if you extracted long/lat from dictionary before converting it to a string.