pandas provides the .head() and .tail() methods to examine just the first few, or last, records in a Series. By default, these return the first or last five rows, respectively, but you can use the n parameter or just pass an integer to specify the number of rows:
In [23]: # first five s.head() Out[23]: 0 0 1 1 2 1 3 2 4 3 dtype: float64 In [24]: # first three s.head(n = 3) # s.head(3) is equivalent Out[24]: 0 0 1 1 2 1 dtype: float64 In [25]: # last five s.tail() Out[25]: 5 4 6 5 7 6 8 7 9 NaN dtype: float64 In [26]: # last 3 s.tail(n = 3) # equivalent to s.tail(3) Out[26]: 7 6 8 7 9 NaN dtype: float64
The .take() method will return the rows in a series that correspond to the zero-based positions specified in a list:
In [27]: # only take specific items s.take([0, 3, 9]) Out[27]: 0 0 3 ...