Keywords Matching Of List Elements With Pandas Column

I have list of elements as: A= ['loans','s-class','veyron','trump','rihana','drake','election'] I also have another pandas dataframe B with columns category and words which is c

Solution 1:

Filter by boolean indexing with iat for select first matched value:

#if always matched all values
matched_categories = [df.loc[df['words'].str.contains(x), 'category'].iat[0] for x in A]
print (matched_categories)
['finance', 'mercedez', 'bugatti', 'politics', 'music', 'music', 'politics']

More general solution if some value is not matched - then return not matched value:

#added last aaa value
A = ['loans','s-class','veyron','trump','rihana','drake','election','aaa']

matched_categories = [next(iter(df.loc[df['words'].str.contains(x),'category']),'not matched')
                      for x in A]
print (matched_categories)
['finance', 'mercedez', 'bugatti', 'politics', 'music', 'music', 'politics', 'not matched']