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

Answer based on @EdChum's comment on his answer. Comment is this -

groupby is notoriously slow and memory hungry, what you could do is sort by column A, then find the idxmin and idxmax (probably store this in a dict) and use this to slice your dataframe would be faster I think 

Let's first create a dataframe with 500k categories in first column and total df shape 20 million as mentioned in question.

df = pd.DataFrame(columns=['a', 'b'])
df['a'] = (np.random.randint(low=0, high=500000, size=(20000000,))).astype(str)
df['b'] = list(range(20000000))
print(df.shape)
df.head()

# Sort data by first column 
df.sort_values(by=['a'], ascending=True, inplace=True)
df.reset_index(drop=True, inplace=True)

# Create a temp column
df['temp_idx'] = list(range(df.shape[0]))

# Take all values of b in a separate list
all_values_b = list(df.b.values)
print(len(all_values_b))

# For each category in column a, find min and max indexes
gp_df = df.groupby(['a']).agg({'temp_idx': [np.min, np.max]})
gp_df.reset_index(inplace=True)
gp_df.columns = ['a', 'temp_idx_min', 'temp_idx_max']

# Now create final list_b column, using min and max indexes for each category of a and filtering list of b. 
gp_df['list_b'] = gp_df[['temp_idx_min', 'temp_idx_max']].apply(lambda x: all_values_b[x[0]:x[1]+1], axis=1)

print(gp_df.shape)
gp_df.head()

This above code takes 2 minutes for 20 million rows and 500k categories in first column.