How to select rows with one or more nulls from a pandas DataFrame without listing columns explicitly?

Question

I have a dataframe with ~300K rows and ~40 columns. I want to find out if any rows contain null values - and put these 'null'-rows into a separate dataframe so that I could explore them easily.

I can create a mask explicitly:

mask = False
for col in df.columns: 
    mask = mask | df[col].isnull()
dfnulls = df[mask]

Or I can do something like:

df.ix[df.index[(df.T == np.nan).sum() > 1]]

Is there a more elegant way of doing it (locating rows with nulls in them)?

Answer 1

[Updated to adapt to modern pandas, which has isnull as a method of DataFrames..]

You can use isnull and any to build a boolean Series and use that to index into your frame:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([range(3), [0, np.NaN, 0], [0, 0, np.NaN], range(3), range(3)])
>>> df.isnull()
       0      1      2
0  False  False  False
1  False   True  False
2  False  False   True
3  False  False  False
4  False  False  False
>>> df.isnull().any(axis=1)
0    False
1     True
2     True
3    False
4    False
dtype: bool
>>> df[df.isnull().any(axis=1)]
   0   1   2
1  0 NaN   0
2  0   0 NaN

---

[For older pandas:]

You could use the function isnull instead of the method:

In [56]: df = pd.DataFrame([range(3), [0, np.NaN, 0], [0, 0, np.NaN], range(3), range(3)])

In [57]: df
Out[57]: 
   0   1   2
0  0   1   2
1  0 NaN   0
2  0   0 NaN
3  0   1   2
4  0   1   2

In [58]: pd.isnull(df)
Out[58]: 
       0      1      2
0  False  False  False
1  False   True  False
2  False  False   True
3  False  False  False
4  False  False  False

In [59]: pd.isnull(df).any(axis=1)
Out[59]: 
0    False
1     True
2     True
3    False
4    False

leading to the rather compact:

In [60]: df[pd.isnull(df).any(axis=1)]
Out[60]: 
   0   1   2
1  0 NaN   0
2  0   0 NaN