Extract substring between two characters - python DataFrame

Question

What is the meaning of string locator ', \\s*([^\\.]*)\\s*\\.' =?

I have a dataframe identical to Extract sub-string between 2 special characters from one column of Pandas DataFrame

and want to extract the substring located between "," and "." . Thanks to the post answer, a way would be as below:

In [157]: df['Title'] = df.Name.str.extract(r',\s*([^\.]*)\s*\.', expand=False)

In [158]: df
Out[158]:
                   Name   Title
0        Jim, Mr. Jones      Mr
1     Sara, Miss. Baker    Miss
2     Leila, Mrs. Jacob     Mrs
3  Ramu, Master. Kuttan  Master

Although I see the outcome being correct, what is the meaning of ',\\s*([^\\.]*)\\s*\\.' ? In particular, what is the meaning of '*' and '\\'?

Answer 1

It means the following, match:

• a , (comma)
• followed by \\s* zero or more whitespaces characters (tab, spaces, etc)
• followed by ([^\\.])* zero or more characters that are not a . (dot)
• followed by \\s* zero or more whitespaces characters
• followed by a \\. (dot)

You can find more about regex in here .

UPDATE

As @UnbearableLightness mentioned the character \\ is redundant inside a character set to escape the . (dot). A character set is anything defined between [] .