How to group dataframe rows into list in pandas groupby

Question

I have a pandas data frame df like:

a b
A 1
A 2
B 5
B 5
B 4
C 6

I want to group by the first column and get second col

Answer 1

Use any of the following groupby and agg recipes.

# Setup
df = pd.DataFrame({
  'a': ['A', 'A', 'B', 'B', 'B', 'C'],
  'b': [1, 2, 5, 5, 4, 6],
  'c': ['x', 'y', 'z', 'x', 'y', 'z']
})
df

   a  b  c
0  A  1  x
1  A  2  y
2  B  5  z
3  B  5  x
4  B  4  y
5  C  6  z

To aggregate multiple columns as lists, use any of the following:

df.groupby('a').agg(list)
df.groupby('a').agg(pd.Series.tolist)

           b          c
a                      
A     [1, 2]     [x, y]
B  [5, 5, 4]  [z, x, y]
C        [6]        [z]

To group-listify a single column only, convert the groupby to a SeriesGroupBy object, then call SeriesGroupBy.agg. Use,

df.groupby('a').agg({'b': list})  # 4.42 ms 
df.groupby('a')['b'].agg(list)    # 2.76 ms - faster

a
A       [1, 2]
B    [5, 5, 4]
C          [6]
Name: b, dtype: object