pandas get rows which are NOT in other dataframe

Question

I\'ve two pandas data frames which have some rows in common.

Suppose dataframe2 is a subset of dataframe1.

How can I get the rows of dataframe1 which

Answer 1

The currently selected solution produces incorrect results. To correctly solve this problem, we can perform a left-join from df1 to df2, making sure to first get just the unique rows for df2.

First, we need to modify the original DataFrame to add the row with data [3, 10].

df1 = pd.DataFrame(data = {'col1' : [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3], 
                           'col2' : [10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 10]}) 
df2 = pd.DataFrame(data = {'col1' : [1, 2, 3],
                           'col2' : [10, 11, 12]})

df1

   col1  col2
0     1    10
1     2    11
2     3    12
3     4    13
4     5    14
5     3    10

df2

   col1  col2
0     1    10
1     2    11
2     3    12

Perform a left-join, eliminating duplicates in df2 so that each row of df1 joins with exactly 1 row of df2. Use the parameter indicator to return an extra column indicating which table the row was from.

df_all = df1.merge(df2.drop_duplicates(), on=['col1','col2'], 
                   how='left', indicator=True)
df_all

   col1  col2     _merge
0     1    10       both
1     2    11       both
2     3    12       both
3     4    13  left_only
4     5    14  left_only
5     3    10  left_only

Create a boolean condition:

df_all['_merge'] == 'left_only'

0    False
1    False
2    False
3     True
4     True
5     True
Name: _merge, dtype: bool

---

Why other solutions are wrong

A few solutions make the same mistake - they only check that each value is independently in each column, not together in the same row. Adding the last row, which is unique but has the values from both columns from df2 exposes the mistake:

common = df1.merge(df2,on=['col1','col2'])
(~df1.col1.isin(common.col1))&(~df1.col2.isin(common.col2))
0    False
1    False
2    False
3     True
4     True
5    False
dtype: bool

This solution gets the same wrong result:

df1.isin(df2.to_dict('l')).all(1)