How to sort pandas dataframe by custom order on string index

Question

I have the following data frame:

import pandas as pd

# Create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame(
{\'id\':[2967, 5335, 13950, 6141, 6169],\\
 \'Player\': [\'Cedric         


        

Answer 1

To get a custom sort-order on your list of strings, declare it as a categorical and manually specify that order in a sort:

player_order = pd.Categorical([ 'Maurice Baker', 'Adrian Caldwell','Ratko Varda' ,'Ryan Bowen' ,'Cedric Hunter'],
              ordered=True)

This is since pandas does not yet allow Categoricals as indices: df.set_index(keys=player_order, inplace=True) TypeError: unhashable type: 'Categorical'

So you'll want to do a manual custom sort using df.sort_index(level=player_order)