In R when you need to retrieve a column index based on the name of the column you could do
idx <- which(names(my_data)==my_colum_name)
Is there a way to do the same with pandas dataframes?
Sure, you can use .get_loc()
:
In [45]: df = DataFrame({"pear": [1,2,3], "apple": [2,3,4], "orange": [3,4,5]})
In [46]: df.columns
Out[46]: Index([apple, orange, pear], dtype=object)
In [47]: df.columns.get_loc("pear")
Out[47]: 2
although to be honest I don't often need this myself. Usually access by name does what I want it to (df["pear"]
, df[["apple", "orange"]]
, or maybe df.columns.isin(["orange", "pear"])
), although I can definitely see cases where you'd want the index number.