Remove rows with empty lists from pandas data frame

To avoid converting to str and actually use the lists, you can do this:

df[df['donation_orgs'].map(lambda d: len(d)) > 0]

It maps the donation_orgs column to the length of the lists of each row and keeps only the ones that have at least one element, filtering out empty lists.

It returns

Out[1]: 
                            donation_context          donation_orgs
1  [In lieu of flowers , memorial donations]  [the research of Dr.]

as expected.

You could try slicing as though the data frame were strings instead of lists:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({
'donation_orgs' : [[], ['the research of Dr.']],
'donation_context': [[], ['In lieu of flowers , memorial donations']]})

df[df.astype(str)['donation_orgs'] != '[]']

Out[9]: 
                            donation_context          donation_orgs
1  [In lieu of flowers , memorial donations]  [the research of Dr.]