将BeautifulSoup函数应用于Pandas DataFrame

Question

I have a Pandas DataFrame that I got from reading a csv, in that file there is HTML tags I want to remove. I want to remove the tags with BeautifulSoup because it is more reliable than using a simple regex like <.*?>.

I usually remove HTML tags from Strings by executing

text = BeautifulSoup(text, 'html.parser').get_text()

Now I want to do this with every element in my DataFrame, so I tried the following:

df.apply(lambda text: BeautifulSoup(text, 'html.parser').get_text())

But that returns the following error:

ValueError: ('The truth value of a Series is ambiguous. Use a.empty, a.bool(), a.item(), a.any() or a.all().', 'occurred at index id')

Answer 1

Use applymap

Ex:

import pandas as pd
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup


df = pd.DataFrame({"a": ["<a>Hello</a>"], "b":["<c>World</c>"]})
print(df.applymap(lambda text: BeautifulSoup(text, 'html.parser').get_text()))

Output:

       a      b
0  Hello  World

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