Using replace efficiently in pandas

use map to perform a lookup:

In [46]:
df['1st'] = df['1st'].map(idxDict)
df
Out[46]:
  1st  2nd
0   a    2
1   b    4
2   c    6

to avoid the situation where there is no valid key you can pass na_action='ignore'

You can also use df['1st'].replace(idxDict) but to answer you question about efficiency:

timings

In [69]:
%timeit df['1st'].replace(idxDict)
%timeit df['1st'].map(idxDict)

1000 loops, best of 3: 1.57 ms per loop
1000 loops, best of 3: 1.08 ms per loop

In [70]:    
%%timeit
for k,v in idxDict.items():
    df ['1st'] = df ['1st'].replace(k, v)

100 loops, best of 3: 3.25 ms per loop

So using map is over 3x faster here

on a larger dataset:

In [3]:
df = pd.concat([df]*10000, ignore_index=True)
df.shape

Out[3]:
(30000, 2)

In [4]:    
%timeit df['1st'].replace(idxDict)
%timeit df['1st'].map(idxDict)

100 loops, best of 3: 18 ms per loop
100 loops, best of 3: 4.31 ms per loop

In [5]:    
%%timeit
for k,v in idxDict.items():
    df ['1st'] = df ['1st'].replace(k, v)

100 loops, best of 3: 18.2 ms per loop

For 30K row df, map is ~4x faster so it scales better than replace or looping