What does the regex parameter in .replace() function mean

Question

I was trying to replace a few unwanted strings that got scraped from a website. So I tried removing them using this code:

df["col_1"].replace('', '', regex=True, inplace=True)

What exactly do regex = True and inplace = True mean?

Answer 1

When inplace=True is passed, the data is renamed in place (it returns nothing), so you'd use:

df.some_column.operation(by=['some_col'], inplace=True)

When inplace=False is passed (this is the default value, so isn't necessary), performs the operation and returns a copy of the object, so you'd use:

df = df.some_column.operation(by=['some_col'])

So by default dataframes are immutable, inplace make them mutable.

And regex=True makes the replacing string be a regular expression