Index pandas DataFrame by column numbers, when column names are integers

Question

I am trying to keep just certain columns of a DataFrame, and it works fine when column names are strings:

In [2]: import numpy as np

In [3]: import pandas as pd         


        

Answer 1

This is certainly one of those things that feels like a bug but is really a design decision (I think).

A few work around options:

rename the columns with their positions as their name:

 df.columns = arange(0,len(df.columns))

Another way is to get names from df.columns:

print df[ df.columns[[1,3]] ]
   11  13
x   1   3
y   8  10
u  15  17
z  22  24
w  29  31

I suspect this is the most appealing as it just requires adding a wee bit of code and not changing any column names.