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

In pandas 0.16.1+ you can drop columns only if they exist per the solution posted by @eiTanLaVi. Prior to that version, you can achieve the same result via a conditional list comprehension:

df.drop([col for col in ['col_name_1','col_name_2',...,'col_name_N'] if col in df], 
        axis=1, inplace=True)