[Python] Pandas str in col failing to find value [duplicate]

I have a df like so:

RangeIndex: 115506 entries, 0 to 115505
Series name: Email
Non-Null Count Dtype
-------------- -----
115506 non-null object
dtypes: object(1)
memory usage: 902.5+ KB


I am searching some string values in the df

'abc' in df.Email returns False


whereas

df.Email.str.contains('abc') returns True


I checked with LLMs and they return that:

1. 'abc' in df.Email

This checks whether the exact string 'abc' is a label in the index of the Series df.Email. It does not check the contents of the Series. That's why it returns False, even if 'abc' appears somewhere in the data.

2. df.Email.str.contains('abc')

This checks each element of the Series to see if 'abc' is a substring of that element. It returns a Series of booleans, and if 'abc' exists in at least one of the values, some elements will be True.


Even in simple df

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'Email': ['abc', 'def']})
'abc' in df.Email
# False


It's been a while since I used pandas, but I could swear thats how I used to check for values in columns

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