Delete column from pandas DataFrame

Question

When deleting a column in a DataFrame I use:

del df[\'column_name\']

And this works great. Why can\'t I use the following?

Answer 1

A nice addition is the ability to drop columns only if they exist. This way you can cover more use cases, and it will only drop the existing columns from the labels passed to it:

Simply add errors='ignore', for example.:

df.drop(['col_name_1', 'col_name_2', ..., 'col_name_N'], inplace=True, axis=1, errors='ignore')

• This is new from pandas 0.16.1 onward. Documentation is here.