How to add a column to a python dataframe, that is a string manipulation of another column?

Question

There is a column named 'country' and I want a column that is 'abc' <= the first two chars of 'country'.

In pseudocode:

df['abc'] = df['country'][0:2]

Of course this does not work.

Answer 1

You want:

df['abc'] = df['country'].str[:2]