Pandas DataFrame to List of Dictionaries

Question

I have the following DataFrame:

customer    item1      item2    item3
1           apple      milk     tomato
2           water      orange   potato
3           juice      mango    chips

which I want to translate it to list of dictionaries per row

rows = [{'customer': 1, 'item1': 'apple', 'item2': 'milk', 'item3': 'tomato'},
    {'customer': 2, 'item1': 'water', 'item2': 'orange', 'item3': 'potato'},
    {'customer': 3, 'item1': 'juice', 'item2': 'mango', 'item3': 'chips'}]

Answer 1

Use df.to_dict('records') -- gives the output without having to transpose externally.

In [2]: df.to_dict('records')
Out[2]:
[{'customer': 1L, 'item1': 'apple', 'item2': 'milk', 'item3': 'tomato'},
 {'customer': 2L, 'item1': 'water', 'item2': 'orange', 'item3': 'potato'},
 {'customer': 3L, 'item1': 'juice', 'item2': 'mango', 'item3': 'chips'}]