Replace Street Names (Strings) with Letters in alphabetical order

Question

So i have a dataset with a few columns. However, one column is made out of locations, in this case street names. I would like to rename those to just one letter. So for example:

Location	Location new
Beukenlaan	A
Deventerlaan	B
Crixstraat	C
Deventerlaan	B

I have to do this for multiple datasheets so the function below would take a lot of time to adjust manually.

df.replace('Eindhoven Genovevalaan', 'A', regex=True, inplace=True)

Any ideas how to do this automatically?

Answer 1

You could use factorize and string.ascii_uppercase :

from string import ascii_uppercase
import numpy as np

d = dict(enumerate(ascii_uppercase))

df['Location new'] = pd.Series(df['Location'].factorize()[0]).map(d)

NB. there are only 26 values in ascii_uppercase ( 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ' ) so you need to specify what should happen if you have more than 26 rows.

output:

       Location Location new
0    Beukenlaan            A
1  Deventerlaan            B
2    Crixstraat            C
3  Deventerlaan            B