How to check if a value exist in other pandas columns which contains several values separated by comma

Question

I have problem with my data. So I want to check a value for column A in column B which contains several values separated by comma. The result that I want is when the value is exist, it will fill column C with True, otherwise it will fill with False.

Sample table like this:

Column_A	Column_B	Column_C
A	A,B,C,AA,BB,CC	True
B	A,AA,BB,CC	False
C	A,B,C	True

I already use something like this .apply(lambda x: x.Column_A in x.Column_B, axis=1) but it resulted the second row as True because it detect B from BB. Basically my script doesn't the comma as separator for different value.

Any solution for my problem?

Answer 1

df['Column_C'] = df.apply(lambda x: x.Column_A in x.Column_B.split(','), axis=1)

Answer 2

Use split:

df['Column_C'] = df.apply(lambda x: x.Column_A in x.Column_B.split(', '), axis=1)

If performance is important use list comprehension:

df['Column_C'] = [a in b.split(', ') for a, b in zip(df.Column_A, df.Column_B)]