How do I retrieve the number of columns in a Pandas data frame?

Question

How do you programmatically retrieve the number of columns in a pandas dataframe? I was hoping for something like:

df.num_columns

Answer 1

If the variable holding the dataframe is called df, then:

len(df.columns)

gives the number of columns.

And for those who want the number of rows:

len(df.index)

For a tuple containing the number of both rows and columns:

df.shape