How Can I Combine Year and Quarter Columns into a Single Period Column in Pandas?

Concatenating Columns for a New Period Column

Problem Statement:

Consider a Pandas dataframe with columns named "Year" and "quarter", as shown below:

<br>Year  quarter<br>2000       q2<br>2001       q3<br>

The objective is to create a new column called "period" by combining the "Year" and "quarter" columns to obtain the following result:

<br>Year  quarter  period<br>2000       q2  2000q2<br>2001       q3  2001q3<br>

Solution:

To concatenate string columns in Python, one can directly use the " " operator:

<br>df["period"] = df["Year"].astype(str)   df["quarter"]<br>

Note that in Python 3, it is necessary to convert the "Year" column to string before performing the concatenation, as shown in the above example using astype(str).

If one or both of the columns are not of string type, this conversion step is crucial to avoid unexpected results.

Additional Options:

For concatenating multiple string columns, Pandas provides a convenient agg function:

<br>df['period'] = df[['Year', 'quarter', ...]].agg('-'.join, axis=1)<br>

Here, '-' represents the separator string used to join the column values. This method is particularly useful when dealing with multiple string columns.

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