Selecting multiple columns in a pandas dataframe

Question

I have data in different columns but I don't know how to extract it to save it in another variable.

index  a   b   c
1      2   3   4
2      3   4   5

How do I select 'a', 'b' and save it in to df1?

I tried

df1 = df['a':'b']
df1 = df.ix[:, 'a':'b']

None seem to work.

Answer 1

Below is my code:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_excel("data.xlsx", sheet_name = 2)
print df
df1 = df[['emp_id','date']]
print df1

Output:

  emp_id        date  count
0   1001   11/1/2018      3
1   1002   11/1/2018      4
2          11/2/2018      2
3          11/3/2018      4
  emp_id        date
0   1001   11/1/2018
1   1002   11/1/2018
2          11/2/2018
3          11/3/2018

First dataframe is the master one. I just copied two columns into df1.

Answer 2

I found this method to be very useful:

# iloc[row slicing, column slicing]
surveys_df.iloc [0:3, 1:4]

More details can be found here

Answer 3

In [39]: df
Out[39]: 
   index  a  b  c
0      1  2  3  4
1      2  3  4  5

In [40]: df1 = df[['b', 'c']]

In [41]: df1
Out[41]: 
   b  c
0  3  4
1  4  5

Answer 4

As of version 0.11.0, columns can be sliced in the manner you tried using the .loc indexer:

df.loc[:, 'C':'E']

returns columns C through E.

---

A demo on a randomly generated DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
np.random.seed(5)
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(100, size=(100, 6)), 
                  columns=list('ABCDEF'), 
                  index=['R{}'.format(i) for i in range(100)])
df.head()

Out: 
     A   B   C   D   E   F
R0  99  78  61  16  73   8
R1  62  27  30  80   7  76
R2  15  53  80  27  44  77
R3  75  65  47  30  84  86
R4  18   9  41  62   1  82

To get the columns from C to E (note that unlike integer slicing, 'E' is included in the columns):

df.loc[:, 'C':'E']

Out: 
      C   D   E
R0   61  16  73
R1   30  80   7
R2   80  27  44
R3   47  30  84
R4   41  62   1
R5    5  58   0
...

Same works for selecting rows based on labels. Get the rows 'R6' to 'R10' from those columns:

df.loc['R6':'R10', 'C':'E']

Out: 
      C   D   E
R6   51  27  31
R7   83  19  18
R8   11  67  65
R9   78  27  29
R10   7  16  94

.loc also accepts a boolean array so you can select the columns whose corresponding entry in the array is True. For example, df.columns.isin(list('BCD')) returns array([False, True, True, True, False, False], dtype=bool) - True if the column name is in the list ['B', 'C', 'D']; False, otherwise.

df.loc[:, df.columns.isin(list('BCD'))]

Out: 
      B   C   D
R0   78  61  16
R1   27  30  80
R2   53  80  27
R3   65  47  30
R4    9  41  62
R5   78   5  58
...

Answer 5

You could provide a list of columns to be dropped and return back the DataFrame with only the columns needed using the drop() function on a Pandas DataFrame.

Just saying

colsToDrop = ['a']
df.drop(colsToDrop, axis=1)

would return a DataFrame with just the columns b and c.

The drop method is documented here.

Answer 6

Assuming your column names (df.columns) are ['index','a','b','c'], then the data you want is in the 3rd & 4th columns. If you don't know their names when your script runs, you can do this

newdf = df[df.columns[2:4]] # Remember, Python is 0-offset! The "3rd" entry is at slot 2.

As EMS points out in his answer, df.ix slices columns a bit more concisely, but the .columns slicing interface might be more natural because it uses the vanilla 1-D python list indexing/slicing syntax.

WARN: 'index' is a bad name for a DataFrame column. That same label is also used for the real df.index attribute, a Index array. So your column is returned by df['index'] and the real DataFrame index is returned by df.index. An Index is a special kind of Series optimized for lookup of it's elements' values. For df.index it's for looking up rows by their label. That df.columns attribute is also a pd.Index array, for looking up columns by their labels.