Fast pandas filtering

Question

I want to filter a pandas dataframe, if the name column entry has an item in a given list.

Here we have a DataFrame

x = DataFrame(
    [[\'sam\', 328], [         


        

Answer 1

If I need to search on a field, I have noticed that it helps immensely if I change the index of the DataFrame to the search field. For one of my search and lookup requirements I got a performance improvement of around 500%.

So in your case the following could be used to search and filter by name.

df = pd.DataFrame([['sam', 328], ['ruby', 3213], ['jon', 121]], 
                 columns=['name', 'score'])
names = ['sam', 'ruby']

df_searchable = df.set_index('name')

df_searchable[df_searchable.index.isin(names)]