[FIXED] Extract substrings from pandas rows that starts and ends with a special character

Issue

I have this df:

id  description
0   changed status to **In progress** of this task
1   changed status to **Closed** of this task   
2   changed status to **Testing** of this task
3   changed status to **Update** of this task
4   changed status to **Completed** of this task

I want to subset this df by extracting the substring from the description column that are between ** such as In Progress, Closed, Testing, Update and Completed.

I tried regex by following some stack overflow's solutions such as:

import re
re.search('**(.+?)**', df.description)

But I got this error:

error: nothing to repeat at position 0

Any idea how to solve this?

Solution

Pandas has regex imbedded:

>>> df['description'].str.extract('\*\*(.*)\*\*')
             0
0  In progress
1       Closed
2      Testing
3       Update
4    Completed
>>> 

Just use the str.extract method.

Answered By - U12-Forward