How to iterate over rows in a DataFrame in Pandas?

Question

I have a DataFrame from pandas:

import pandas as pd
inp = [{'c1':10, 'c2':100}, {'c1':11,'c2':110}, {'c1':12,'c2':120}]
df = pd.DataFrame(inp)
print df

Output:

   c1   c2
0  10  100
1  11  110
2  12  120

Now I want to iterate over the rows of this frame. For every row I want to be able to access its elements (values in cells) by the name of the columns. For example:

for row in df.rows:
   print row['c1'], row['c2']

Is it possible to do that in pandas?

I found this similar question. But it does not give me the answer I need. For example, it is suggested there to use:

for date, row in df.T.iteritems():

or

for row in df.iterrows():

But I do not understand what the row object is and how I can work with it.

Answer 1

I was looking for How to iterate on rows AND columns and ended here so :

for i, row in df.iterrows():
    for j, column in row.iteritems():
        print(column)

Answer 2

You can write your own iterator that implements namedtuple

from collections import namedtuple

def myiter(d, cols=None):
    if cols is None:
        v = d.values.tolist()
        cols = d.columns.values.tolist()
    else:
        j = [d.columns.get_loc(c) for c in cols]
        v = d.values[:, j].tolist()

    n = namedtuple('MyTuple', cols)

    for line in iter(v):
        yield n(*line)

This is directly comparable to pd.DataFrame.itertuples. I'm aiming at performing the same task with more efficiency.

---

For the given dataframe with my function:

list(myiter(df))

[MyTuple(c1=10, c2=100), MyTuple(c1=11, c2=110), MyTuple(c1=12, c2=120)]

Or with pd.DataFrame.itertuples:

list(df.itertuples(index=False))

[Pandas(c1=10, c2=100), Pandas(c1=11, c2=110), Pandas(c1=12, c2=120)]

---

A comprehensive test
We test making all columns available and subsetting the columns.

def iterfullA(d):
    return list(myiter(d))

def iterfullB(d):
    return list(d.itertuples(index=False))

def itersubA(d):
    return list(myiter(d, ['col3', 'col4', 'col5', 'col6', 'col7']))

def itersubB(d):
    return list(d[['col3', 'col4', 'col5', 'col6', 'col7']].itertuples(index=False))

res = pd.DataFrame(
    index=[10, 30, 100, 300, 1000, 3000, 10000, 30000],
    columns='iterfullA iterfullB itersubA itersubB'.split(),
    dtype=float
)

for i in res.index:
    d = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(10, size=(i, 10))).add_prefix('col')
    for j in res.columns:
        stmt = '{}(d)'.format(j)
        setp = 'from __main__ import d, {}'.format(j)
        res.at[i, j] = timeit(stmt, setp, number=100)

res.groupby(res.columns.str[4:-1], axis=1).plot(loglog=True);

Answer 3

To iterate through DataFrame's row in pandas one can use:

• DataFrame.iterrows()

  for index, row in df.iterrows():
      print row["c1"], row["c2"]
  

• DataFrame.itertuples()

  for row in df.itertuples(index=True, name='Pandas'):
      print getattr(row, "c1"), getattr(row, "c2")
  

itertuples() is supposed to be faster than iterrows()

But be aware, according to the docs (pandas 0.21.1 at the moment):

• iterrows: dtype might not match from row to row

  Because iterrows returns a Series for each row, it does not preserve dtypes across the rows (dtypes are preserved across columns for DataFrames).

• iterrows: Do not modify rows

  You should never modify something you are iterating over. This is not guaranteed to work in all cases. Depending on the data types, the iterator returns a copy and not a view, and writing to it will have no effect.

  Use DataFrame.apply() instead:

  new_df = df.apply(lambda x: x * 2)
  

• itertuples:

  The column names will be renamed to positional names if they are invalid Python identifiers, repeated, or start with an underscore. With a large number of columns (>255), regular tuples are returned.

Answer 4

While iterrows() is a good option, sometimes itertuples() can be much faster:

df = pd.DataFrame({'a': randn(1000), 'b': randn(1000),'N': randint(100, 1000, (1000)), 'x': 'x'})

%timeit [row.a * 2 for idx, row in df.iterrows()]
# => 10 loops, best of 3: 50.3 ms per loop

%timeit [row[1] * 2 for row in df.itertuples()]
# => 1000 loops, best of 3: 541 µs per loop

Answer 5

Use itertuples(). It is faster than iterrows():

for row in df.itertuples():
    print "c1 :",row.c1,"c2 :",row.c2

Answer 6

You can also do numpy indexing for even greater speed ups. It's not really iterating but works much better than iteration for certain applications.

subset = row['c1'][0:5]
all = row['c1'][:]

You may also want to cast it to an array. These indexes/selections are supposed to act like Numpy arrays already but I ran into issues and needed to cast

np.asarray(all)
imgs[:] = cv2.resize(imgs[:], (224,224) ) #resize every image in an hdf5 file