Python - If column name contains a specific string then change the values in that column otherwise the values remain

Question

I'm trying to write some code which looks at the column names and sets the column value to 0 if that column name contains a specific string. I have a dataset with columns similar to this:

date apples_sold bananas_sold pineapples_sold orange_sold

I want to update any columns with the string "apple" to make every row 0 for that column. If the column doesn't contain "apple" then the value should remain.

I tried looping through the column names but am unsure the syntax as I don't want to hardcode the specific column names.

Answer 1

Try loc update with .str.contains :

df.loc[:, df.columns.str.contains('apple')] = 0