Pandas: Randomize Letters In A Column

I have a data frame that looks like this: id1 | id2 ---------------------------- ab51c-ee-1a | cga--=%abd21 I am looking to randomize the letters only: id1 |

Solution 1:

Lets use apply, with the power of str.replace to replace only alphabets using regex i.e

import string 
import random

letters = list(string.ascii_lowercase)

defrand(stri):
    return random.choice(letters)

df.apply(lambda x : x.str.replace('[a-z]',rand))

Output :

           id1            id2
0  gp51e-id-1v      jvj--=%glw21

For one specific column use

df['id1'].str.replace('[a-z]',rand)

---

Added by @antonvbr: For future reference, if we want to change upper and lower case we could do this:

letters = dict(u=list(string.ascii_uppercase),l=list(string.ascii_lowercase))

(df['id1'].str.replace('[a-z]',lambda x: random.choice(letters['l']))
          .str.replace('[A-Z]',lambda x: random.choice(letters['u'])))

Solution 2:

How about this:

import pandas as pd
from string import ascii_lowercase as al
import random

df = pd.DataFrame({'id1': ['ab51c-ee-1a'],
                   'id2': ['cga--=%abd21']})

al = list(al)
df = df.applymap(lambda x: ''.join([random.choice(al) if i in al else i for i inlist(x)]))