Renaming columns in pandas

Question

I have a DataFrame using pandas and column labels that I need to edit to replace the original column labels.

I'd like to change the column names in a DataFrame A where the original column names are:

['$a', '$b', '$c', '$d', '$e'] 

to

['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'].

I have the edited column names stored it in a list, but I don't know how to replace the column names.

Answer 1

The rename method can take a function, for example:

In [11]: df.columns
Out[11]: Index([u'$a', u'$b', u'$c', u'$d', u'$e'], dtype=object)

In [12]: df.rename(columns=lambda x: x[1:], inplace=True)

In [13]: df.columns
Out[13]: Index([u'a', u'b', u'c', u'd', u'e'], dtype=object)

Answer 2

You could use str.slice for that:

df.columns = df.columns.str.slice(1)

Answer 3

Here's a nifty little function I like to use to cut down on typing:

def rename(data, oldnames, newname): 
    if type(oldnames) == str: #input can be a string or list of strings 
        oldnames = [oldnames] #when renaming multiple columns 
        newname = [newname] #make sure you pass the corresponding list of new names
    i = 0 
    for name in oldnames:
        oldvar = [c for c in data.columns if name in c]
        if len(oldvar) == 0: 
            raise ValueError("Sorry, couldn't find that column in the dataset")
        if len(oldvar) > 1: #doesn't have to be an exact match 
            print("Found multiple columns that matched " + str(name) + " :")
            for c in oldvar:
                print(str(oldvar.index(c)) + ": " + str(c))
            ind = input('please enter the index of the column you would like to rename: ')
            oldvar = oldvar[int(ind)]
        if len(oldvar) == 1:
            oldvar = oldvar[0]
        data = data.rename(columns = {oldvar : newname[i]})
        i += 1 
    return data   

Here is an example of how it works:

In [2]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(0,10,size=(10, 4)), columns=['col1','col2','omg','idk'])
#first list = existing variables
#second list = new names for those variables
In [3]: df = rename(df, ['col','omg'],['first','ohmy']) 
Found multiple columns that matched col :
0: col1
1: col2

please enter the index of the column you would like to rename: 0

In [4]: df.columns
Out[5]: Index(['first', 'col2', 'ohmy', 'idk'], dtype='object')

Answer 4

As documented in http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/text.html:

df.columns = df.columns.str.replace('$','')

Answer 5

Renaming columns while reading the Dataframe: 

>>> df = pd.DataFrame({'$a': [1], '$b': [1], '$c': [1]}).rename(columns = 
         {'$a' : 'a','$b':'b','$c':'c'})

Out[1]: 
   a  b  c
0  1  1  1

Answer 6

If you have to deal with loads of columns named by the providing system out of your control, I came up with the following approach that is a combination of a general approach and specific replacments in one go.

I first create a dictionary from the dataframe column names using regex expressions in order to throw away certain appendixes of column names and then I add specific replacements to the dictionary to name core columns as expected later in the receiving database.

This is then applied to the dataframe in one go.

dict=dict(zip(df.columns,df.columns.str.replace('(:S$|:C1$|:L$|:D$|\.Serial:L$)','')))
dict['brand_timeseries:C1']='BTS'
dict['respid:L']='RespID'
dict['country:C1']='CountryID
dict['pim1:D']='pim_actual'
df.rename(columns=dict, inplace=True)