pandas - How to check whether the content of Column A is contained in Column B using Python DataFrame?

Question

I have two columns in a pandas DataFrame: authors and name. I want to create a third column: a cell's value is True if the corresponding row's name is contained in the corresponding row's authors, and False otherwise.

So the result will look like the picture below.

I have tried .str.contains(), .str.extract(), .str.find(), .where(), and etc. But Python returns an error: 'Series' objects are mutable, thus they cannot be hashed. Does anyone know how to create the third column in Python?

Answer 1

IIUC then you can apply a lambda row-wise to check if the Name string is present in Authors:

df['Check'] = df.apply(lambda row: row['Name'] in row['Authors'], axis=1)

should work

You can't use str.contains(), str.extract(), str.find(), or where()here because you're trying to compare row-wise and those methods expect a fixed list or pattern for the searching criteria.