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

#use a regular expression to parse the column count
#https://docs.python.org/3/library/re.html

buffer = io.StringIO()
df.info(buf=buffer)
s = buffer.getvalue()
pat=re.search(r"total\s{1}[0-9]\s{1}column",s)
print(s)
phrase=pat.group(0)
value=re.findall(r'[0-9]+',phrase)[0]
print(int(value))