pandas select from Dataframe using startswith

You can use the str.startswith DataFrame method to give more consistent results:

In [11]: s = pd.Series(['a', 'ab', 'c', 11, np.nan])

In [12]: s
Out[12]:
0      a
1     ab
2      c
3     11
4    NaN
dtype: object

In [13]: s.str.startswith('a', na=False)
Out[13]:
0     True
1     True
2    False
3    False
4    False
dtype: bool

and the boolean indexing will work just fine (I prefer to use loc, but it works just the same without):

In [14]: s.loc[s.str.startswith('a', na=False)]
Out[14]:
0     a
1    ab
dtype: object

.

It looks least one of your elements in the Series/column is a float, which doesn’t have a startswith method hence the AttributeError, the list comprehension should raise the same error…