Selecting multiple columns in a pandas dataframe

Question

I have data in different columns but I don\'t know how to extract it to save it in another variable.

index  a   b   c
1      2   3   4
2      3   4   5
         


        

Answer 1

As of version 0.11.0, columns can be sliced in the manner you tried using the .loc indexer:

df.loc[:, 'C':'E']

is equivalent of

df[['C', 'D', 'E']]  # or df.loc[:, ['C', 'D', 'E']]

and returns columns C through E.

---

A demo on a randomly generated DataFrame:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
np.random.seed(5)
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(100, size=(100, 6)), 
                  columns=list('ABCDEF'), 
                  index=['R{}'.format(i) for i in range(100)])
df.head()

Out: 
     A   B   C   D   E   F
R0  99  78  61  16  73   8
R1  62  27  30  80   7  76
R2  15  53  80  27  44  77
R3  75  65  47  30  84  86
R4  18   9  41  62   1  82

To get the columns from C to E (note that unlike integer slicing, 'E' is included in the columns):

df.loc[:, 'C':'E']

Out: 
      C   D   E
R0   61  16  73
R1   30  80   7
R2   80  27  44
R3   47  30  84
R4   41  62   1
R5    5  58   0
...

Same works for selecting rows based on labels. Get the rows 'R6' to 'R10' from those columns:

df.loc['R6':'R10', 'C':'E']

Out: 
      C   D   E
R6   51  27  31
R7   83  19  18
R8   11  67  65
R9   78  27  29
R10   7  16  94

.loc also accepts a boolean array so you can select the columns whose corresponding entry in the array is True. For example, df.columns.isin(list('BCD')) returns array([False, True, True, True, False, False], dtype=bool) - True if the column name is in the list ['B', 'C', 'D']; False, otherwise.

df.loc[:, df.columns.isin(list('BCD'))]

Out: 
      B   C   D
R0   78  61  16
R1   27  30  80
R2   53  80  27
R3   65  47  30
R4    9  41  62
R5   78   5  58
...