Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Matt Harrison, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Pandas 1.x Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Matt Harrison, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

The pandas library is massive, and it's common for frequent users to be unaware of many of its more impressive features. The official pandas documentation, while thorough, does not contain many useful examples of how to piece together multiple commands as one would do during an actual analysis. This book guides you, as if you were looking over the shoulder of an expert, through situations that you are highly likely to encounter. This new updated and revised edition provides you with unique, idiomatic, and fun recipes for both fundamental and advanced data manipulation tasks with pandas. Some recipes focus on achieving a deeper understanding of basic principles, or comparing and contrasting two similar operations. Other recipes will dive deep into a particular dataset, uncovering new and unexpected insights along the way. Many advanced recipes combine several different features across the pandas library to generate results.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
15
Other Books You May Enjoy
16
Index

Slicing lexicographically

The .loc attribute typically selects data based on the exact string label of the index. However, it also allows you to select data based on the lexicographic order of the values in the index. Specifically, .loc allows you to select all rows with an index lexicographically using slice notation. This only works if the index is sorted.

In this recipe, you will first sort the index and then use slice notation inside the .loc indexer to select all rows between two strings.

How to do it…

  1. Read in the college dataset, and set the institution name as the index:
    >>> college = pd.read_csv(
    ...     "data/college.csv", index_col="INSTNM"
    ... )
    
  2. Attempt to select all colleges with names lexicographically between Sp and Su:
    >>> college.loc["Sp":"Su"]
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      ...
    ValueError: index must be monotonic increasing or decreasing
    During handling...