str.strip() for whitespace in Pandas - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Clean Up Product Names Using str.strip()

📖 Scenario: You work in a store's data team. The product names in the sales data have extra spaces at the start or end. This makes it hard to analyze the data correctly.

🎯 Goal: You will clean the product names by removing extra spaces using str.strip() in pandas.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a pandas DataFrame with product names including extra spaces

Create a variable to hold the column name 'Product'

Use str.strip() on the product names to remove spaces

Print the cleaned product names column

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cleaning text data is a common task in data science to prepare data for analysis or machine learning. Extra spaces can cause errors or wrong results.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts often clean messy data like product names, customer info, or survey answers before working with it.

1

Create the sales DataFrame with product names

Create a pandas DataFrame called sales with one column named 'Product'. The column should have these exact values with spaces: ' Apple', 'Banana ', ' Cherry ', 'Date'.

Pandas

# Create the sales DataFrame with product names including spaces
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use pd.DataFrame with a dictionary. The key is 'Product' and the value is the list of product names with spaces.

2

Create a variable for the product column name

Create a variable called product_col and set it to the string 'Product'.

Pandas

import pandas as pd

sales = pd.DataFrame({
    'Product': ['  Apple', 'Banana  ', '  Cherry  ', 'Date']
})

# Create a variable product_col with value 'Product'
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the string 'Product' to the variable product_col.

3

Remove extra spaces from product names using str.strip()

Use str.strip() on the sales[product_col] column to remove spaces at the start and end. Save the cleaned names back to sales[product_col].

Pandas

import pandas as pd

sales = pd.DataFrame({
    'Product': ['  Apple', 'Banana  ', '  Cherry  ', 'Date']
})

product_col = 'Product'

# Remove spaces from product names using str.strip()
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sales[product_col].str.strip() to remove spaces and assign it back to sales[product_col].

4

Print the cleaned product names

Print the sales[product_col] column to show the cleaned product names without extra spaces.

Pandas

import pandas as pd

sales = pd.DataFrame({
    'Product': ['  Apple', 'Banana  ', '  Cherry  ', 'Date']
})

product_col = 'Product'

sales[product_col] = sales[product_col].str.strip()

# Print the cleaned product names
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(sales[product_col]) to display the cleaned product names.