how to sort pandas dataframe from one column

Question

I have a data frame like this:

print(df)

        0          1     2
0   354.7      April   4.0
1    55.4     August   8.0
2   176.5   December  12.0
3    95.5   February   2.0
4    85.6    January   1.0
5     152       July   7.0
6   238.7       June   6.0
7   104.8      March   3.0
8   283.5        May   5.0
9   278.8   November  11.0
10  249.6    October  10.0
11  212.7  September   9.0

As you can see, months are not in calendar order. So I created a second column to get the month number corresponding to each month (1-12). From there, how can I sort this data frame according to calendar months' order?

Answer 1

Use sort_values to sort the df by a specific column's values:

In [18]:
df.sort_values('2')

Out[18]:
        0          1     2
4    85.6    January   1.0
3    95.5   February   2.0
7   104.8      March   3.0
0   354.7      April   4.0
8   283.5        May   5.0
6   238.7       June   6.0
5   152.0       July   7.0
1    55.4     August   8.0
11  212.7  September   9.0
10  249.6    October  10.0
9   278.8   November  11.0
2   176.5   December  12.0

If you want to sort by two columns, pass a list of column labels to sort_values with the column labels ordered according to sort priority. If you use df.sort_values(['2', '0']), the result would be sorted by column 2 then column 0. Granted, this does not really make sense for this example because each value in df['2'] is unique.