pandas - Filtering DataFrame by list of substrings

Question

Building off this answer, is there a way to filter a Pandas dataframe by a list of substrings?

Say I want to find all rows where df['menu_item'] contains fresh or spaghetti

Without something like this:

df[df['menu_item'].str.contains('fresh') | (df['menu_item'].str.contains('spaghetti')]

Answer 1

The str.contains method you're using accepts regex, so use the regex | as or:

df[df['menu_item'].str.contains('fresh|spaghetti')]

Example Input:

          menu_item
0        fresh fish
1      fresher fish
2           lasagna
3     spaghetti o's
4  something edible

Example Output:

       menu_item
0     fresh fish
1   fresher fish
3  spaghetti o's