Mastering pandas - Second Edition

Comparing R lists and pandas series

List creation and selection in R is as follows:

>cal_lst<- list(weekdays=1:8, mth='jan') 
>cal_lst 
$weekdays 
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
 
$mth 
[1] "jan" 
 
>cal_lst[1] 
$weekdays 
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
 
>cal_lst[[1]] 
[1] 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 
 
>cal_lst[2] 
$mth 
[1] "jan" 

Series creation and selection in pandas is effected as follows:

In [92]: cal_df= pd.Series({'weekdays':range(1,8), 'mth':'jan'}) 
In [93]: cal_df 
Out[93]: mthjan 
weekdays    [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] 
dtype: object 
 
In [97]: cal_df[0] 
Out[97]: 'jan' 
 
In [95]: cal_df[1] 
Out[95]: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] 
 
In [96]: cal_df[[1]] 
Out[96]: weekdays    [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] 
dtype: object 

Here, we see a difference between an R-list and a pandas series from the perspective of the [] and ...