How to get the last N rows of a pandas DataFrame?

Question

I have pandas dataframe df1 and df2 (df1 is vanila dataframe, df2 is indexed by \'STK_ID\' & \'RPT_Date\') :

>>> df1
          


        

Answer 1

This is because of using integer indices (ix selects those by label over -3 rather than position, and this is by design: see integer indexing in pandas "gotchas"*).

*In newer versions of pandas prefer loc or iloc to remove the ambiguity of ix as position or label:

df.iloc[-3:]

see the docs.

As Wes points out, in this specific case you should just use tail!

Answer 2

Don't forget DataFrame.tail! e.g. df1.tail(10)

Answer 3

How to get the last N rows of a pandas DataFrame?

If you are slicing by position, __getitem__ (i.e., slicing with[]) works well, and is the most succinct solution I've found for this problem.

pd.__version__
# '0.24.2'

df = pd.DataFrame({'A': list('aaabbbbc'), 'B': np.arange(1, 9)})
df

   A  B
0  a  1
1  a  2
2  a  3
3  b  4
4  b  5
5  b  6
6  b  7
7  c  8

df[-3:]

   A  B
5  b  6
6  b  7
7  c  8

This is the same as calling df.iloc[-3:], for instance (iloc internally delegates to __getitem__).

---

As an aside, if you want to find the last N rows for each group, use groupby and GroupBy.tail:

df.groupby('A').tail(2)

   A  B
1  a  2
2  a  3
5  b  6
6  b  7
7  c  8