Pandas - Get first row value of a given column

Question

This seems like a ridiculously easy question... but I'm not seeing the easy answer I was expecting.

So, how do I get the value at an nth row of a given column in Pandas? (I am particularly interested in the first row, but would be interested in a more general practice as well).

For example, let's say I want to pull the 1.2 value in Btime as a variable.

Whats the right way to do this?

df_test =

  ATime   X   Y   Z   Btime  C   D   E
0    1.2  2  15   2    1.2  12  25  12
1    1.4  3  12   1    1.3  13  22  11
2    1.5  1  10   6    1.4  11  20  16
3    1.6  2   9  10    1.7  12  29  12
4    1.9  1   1   9    1.9  11  21  19
5    2.0  0   0   0    2.0   8  10  11
6    2.4  0   0   0    2.4  10  12  15

Answer 1

Another way to do this:

first_value = df['Btime'].values[0]

This way seems to be faster than using .iloc:

In [1]: %timeit -n 1000 df['Btime'].values[20]
5.82 µs ± 142 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

In [2]: %timeit -n 1000 df['Btime'].iloc[20]
29.2 µs ± 1.28 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 1000 loops each)

Answer 2

To select the ith row, use iloc:

In [31]: df_test.iloc[0]
Out[31]: 
ATime     1.2
X         2.0
Y        15.0
Z         2.0
Btime     1.2
C        12.0
D        25.0
E        12.0
Name: 0, dtype: float64

To select the ith value in the Btime column you could use:

In [30]: df_test['Btime'].iloc[0]
Out[30]: 1.2

---

Warning: I had previously suggested df_test.ix[i, 'Btime']. But this is not guaranteed to give you the ith value since ix tries to index by label before trying to index by position. So if the DataFrame has an integer index which is not in sorted order starting at 0, then using ix[i] will return the row labeled i rather than the ith row. For example,

In [1]: df = pd.DataFrame({'foo':list('ABC')}, index=[0,2,1])

In [2]: df
Out[2]: 
  foo
0   A
2   B
1   C

In [4]: df.ix[1, 'foo']
Out[4]: 'C'

Answer 3

In a general way, if you want to pick up the first N rows from the J column from pandas dataframe the best way to do this is:

data = dataframe[0:N][:,J]

Answer 4

Note that the answer from @unutbu will be correct until you want to set the value to something new, then it will not work if your dataframe is a view.

In [4]: df = pd.DataFrame({'foo':list('ABC')}, index=[0,2,1])
In [5]: df['bar'] = 100
In [6]: df['bar'].iloc[0] = 99
/opt/local/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pandas-0.16.0_19_g8d2818e-py2.7-macosx-10.9-x86_64.egg/pandas/core/indexing.py:118: SettingWithCopyWarning:
A value is trying to be set on a copy of a slice from a DataFrame

See the the caveats in the documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/indexing.html#indexing-view-versus-copy
  self._setitem_with_indexer(indexer, value)

Another approach that will consistently work with both setting and getting is:

In [7]: df.loc[df.index[0], 'foo']
Out[7]: 'A'
In [8]: df.loc[df.index[0], 'bar'] = 99
In [9]: df
Out[9]:
  foo  bar
0   A   99
2   B  100
1   C  100

Answer 5

1. df.iloc[0].head(1) - First data set only from entire first row.
2. df.iloc[0] - Entire First row in column.