Accessing a Pandas index like a regular column

Question

I have a Pandas DataFrame with a named index. I want to pass it off to a piece off code that takes a DataFrame, a column name, and some other stuff, and does a bunch of work inv

Answer 1

Instead of using reset_index, you could just copy the index to a normal column, do some work and then drop the column, for example:

df['tmp'] = df.index
# do stuff based on df['tmp']
del df['tmp']