Delete Pandas DataFrame row if contains character

Question

I'm trying to remove any row that contains a "?" in a particular column.

I have this line:

df[~df.C.str.contains("?")]

which doesn't work. I get the following error:

error: nothing to repeat at position 0

However the following does work

df[~df.C.str.contains("abc")]

Does anyone know what it is about ? that stops it running?

Answer 1

.str.contains() expects a regular expression by default; ? is treated as a metacharacter, and using it alone will raise re.error.* Pass regex=False to search for a literal "?" character:

df[~df.C.str.contains("?", regex=False)]

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_{* See re.compile("?")}