How to remove ' ' from a list in python

Make an explicit filter on it: filter(lambda x: x != "", your_list) or use a list comprehension: [x for x in your_list if x != ""]. They work the same, just a matter of preference.

You don't want to filter out by a boolean method because then you'd accidentally get rid of 0s because they're "falsy" in python.

If you have an list , you can use filter on it to filter out the elements that you don't want to be in the list as follows -

my_list = [1,2,3,4,'',6,7]
my_list = list(filter(lambda x : x!='',my_list))
print(my_list)

OUTPUT :

[1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7]

This can also be easily extended for an 2-d list using map. We will basically just apply the first function on every element of a 2-d list as follows -

my_list = [[1,2,3,4,'',6,7],[2,3,'',5,6]]
my_list = list(map(lambda sub_list:list(filter(lambda x : x!='',sub_list)),my_list))
print(my_list)

OUTPUT :

[[1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7], [2, 3, 5, 6]]

For your particular issue, you can simply put it in a try block, it throws an error when it comes across lists that don't have "" as an element for those you can

for i, row in df.iterrows():
     row['column'] = list(filter(lambda x: x != "", row['column']))
   

If you just want ways to remove "" from list,

You can try,

new_list= [s for s in your_list if s != ""]

or

new_list = list(filter(lambda x: x != "", your_list))

also works

i dont know how exactly u got the error. if your columns just has two elemens as mentioned, it should work as shown below.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'column':[[1,2,3,4,'',6,7],[2,3,'',5,6]]})
df['column'].apply(lambda x:x.remove(''))
print(df)

Output

               column
0  [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7]
1        [2, 3, 5, 6]

the problem may happened because u may have an element which have no '' in it like [2,3,5,6] so in that case this error may occur. so just recreating the error we can see the same error happening.

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'column':[[1,2,3,4,'',6,7],[2,3,'',5,6],[2,3,5,6]]})
df['column'].apply(lambda x:x.remove(''))
print(df)

Error Output

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/Deva/PycharmProjects/IITJ/ML/MLf3/extras/adaf.py", line 3, in <module>
    df['column'].apply(lambda x:x.remove(''))
  File "C:\Users\Deva\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python38\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\series.py", line 3848, in apply
    mapped = lib.map_infer(values, f, convert=convert_dtype)
  File "pandas\_libs\lib.pyx", line 2329, in pandas._libs.lib.map_infer
  File "C:/Users/Deva/PycharmProjects/IITJ/ML/MLf3/extras/adaf.py", line 3, in <lambda>
    df['column'].apply(lambda x:x.remove(''))
ValueError: list.remove(x): x not in list

Solution For above situation

To avoid that just introduce try except

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({'column':[[1,2,3,4,'',6,7],[2,3,'',5,6],[2,3,5,6]]})
try:
    df['column'].apply(lambda x:x.remove(''))
except:
    pass
print(df)

Output

               column
0  [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7]
1        [2, 3, 5, 6]
2        [2, 3, 5, 6]