str.cat does not align on index?

The implicit index-matching of pandas for operations between different DataFrame/Series is great and most of the times, it just works. It does so consistently enough, that the expectation (for me) is that different Series will be aligned before an operation is performed.

For some reason, str.cat does not seem to do so.

import pandas as pd # 0.21.0
import numpy as np # 1.13.3
col = pd.Series(['a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h','i','j'])

# choose random subsets
ss1 = [8, 1, 2, 0, 6] # list(col.sample(5).index) 
ss2 = [4, 0, 9, 2, 6] # list(col.sample(5).index)

# perform str.cat
col.loc[ss1].str.cat(col.loc[ss2], sep = '').sort_index()
# 0    ac <-- UNMATCHED!
# 1    ba <-- UNMATCHED!
# 2    cj <-- UNMATCHED!
# 6    gg <-- correct by sheer luck
# 8    ie <-- UNMATCHED!

# compared for example with Boolean operations on unmatched series
# (matching indices and returning Series with union of both indices),
# this is inconsistent!
b = col.loc[ss1].astype(bool) & col.loc[ss2].astype(bool)
b
# 0     True
# 1    False
# 2     True
# 4    False
# 6     True
# 8    False
# 9    False

# if we manually align the Series
# (easy here by masking from the Series we just subsampled, hard in practice),
# then the NaNs are handled as expected:
m = col.where(np.isin(col.index, ss1)).str.cat(col.where(np.isin(col.index, ss2)), sep = '')
m
# 0     aa
# 1    NaN
# 2     cc
# 3    NaN
# 4    NaN
# 5    NaN
# 6     gg
# 7    NaN
# 8    NaN
# 9    NaN

# based on the normal pandas-behaviour for unmatched Series
# (for example as for Boolean "and" above), the following would be
# the expected result of col.loc[ss1].str.cat(col.loc[ss2], sep = '').sort_index() !
m.loc[b.index]
# 0     aa <-- MATCHED!
# 1    NaN
# 2     cc <-- MATCHED!
# 4    NaN
# 6     gg <-- MATCHED!
# 8    NaN
# 9    NaN

[TomAugspurger]

align=None will let us detect whether or not the user explicitly wanted alignment. So it’s

if align is None: warnings.warn("A future version of pandas will perform alignment when others is a series. To disable alignment (the previous behavior) and silence this warning, pass ‘align=False’. To enable alignment (the future behavior) and silence this warning, pass ‘align=True’

On Wed, Dec 6, 2017 at 2:35 PM, h-vetinari [e-mail] wrote:

Cool! I think your proposal for dealing with the API-breaking sounds good, except maybe calling it align = False by default first, and changing to True at some point in the future (not unlike the expand-keyword that .str.extract gained in 0.18)

Looking at https://pandas-docs.github.io/pandas-docs-travis/text.html# method-summary, it seems that .str.cat is the only method that deals with two different Series. Maybe that’s why the alignment for it fell through the cracks?

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[h-vetinari]

@TomAugspurger @jreback This can now be closed.