Thinking in Pandas: How to Use the Python Data Analysis Library the Right Way

© Hannah Stepanek 2020

H. StepanekThinking in Pandashttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-5839-2_2

2. Basic Data Access and Merging

Hannah Stepanek¹ 

(1)

Portland, OR, USA

 

There are many ways of accessing and merging DataFrames with pandas. This chapter will go over the basic methods for getting data out of a DataFrame, creating a sub-DataFrame, and merging DataFrames together.

DataFrame creation and access

pandas has a dictionary-like syntax that is very intuitive for those familiar with Python but not with pandas. Each column name is treated as a key, and the row values are returned as the value. The DataFrame object constructor also accepts a dictionary as a way of creating a DataFrame. Note when you get the column from a DataFrame, it points back to ...