Pandas converting String object to lower case and checking for string

I'm a bit late to the party, but you could use the keyarg case : bool, default True, If True, case sensitive.

private["ISH"] = private.HolidayName.str.contains("holiday|recess", case=False)
public["ISH"] = public.HolidayName.str.contains("holiday|recess", case=False)

private["ISH"] = private.HolidayName.str.contains("(?i)holiday|recess")

The (?i) in the regex pattern tells the re module to ignore case.

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The reason why you were getting an error is because the Series object does not have the contains method; instead the Series.str attribute has the contains method. So you could avoid the error with:

private["ISH"] = private.HolidayName.str.lower().str.contains("holiday|recess")