How do I import an excel file and search for specific record using python and pandas?

Question

I'm trying to import an excel file and search for a specific record

Here's what I have come up with so far, which keeps throwing error.

The excel spread sheet has two columns Keyword and Description , each keyword is around 10 characters max, and description is around 150 characters max.

I can print the whole sheet in the excel file without any errors using print(df1) but as soon as I try to search for a specific value it errors out.

Error

ValueError: ('Lengths must match to compare', (33,), (1,))

Code

import pandas as pd

file = 'Methods.xlsx'
df = pd.ExcelFile(file)
df1 = df.parse('Keywords')
lookup = df1['Description'].where(df1['Keyword']==["as"])
print (lookup)

Answer 1

the filter syntax is like this

df_filtered = df[df[COLUMN]==KEYWORD]

so in your case it'd be

lookup = df1[df1['Keyword'] == "as"]['Description']

or the whole code

import pandas as pd
file = 'Methods.xlsx'
df = pd.ExcelFile(file)
df1 = df.parse('Keywords')
lookup = df1[df1['Keyword'] == "as"]['Description']
print (lookup)

---

breaking it down:

is_keyword = df1['Keyword'] == "as"

this would return a series containing True or False depending on if the keyword was present.
then we can filter the dataframe to get those rows that have True with.

df_filtered = df1[is_keyword]

this will result in all the columns, so to get only the Description column we get it by

lookup = df_filtered['description']

or in one line

lookup = df1[df1['Keyword'] == "as"]['Description']

Answer 2

adding to the elaborate answer given by @Jimmar above:

Just for syntactical convenience, you could write the code like this:

lookup = df1[df1.keyword == "as"].Description

Pandas provides column name lookup like it is a member of DataFrame class( use of dot notation). Please note that the for using this way the column names should not have any spaces in them