Pandas join/merge/concat two dataframes

Question

I am having issues with joins in pandas and I am trying to figure out what is wrong. Say I have a dataframe x:

Answer 1

Does your index have duplicates x.index.is_unique? If so would explain the behavior you're seeing:

In [16]: left
Out[16]: 
            a
2000-01-01  1
2000-01-01  1
2000-01-01  1
2000-01-02  2
2000-01-02  2
2000-01-02  2

In [17]: right
Out[17]: 
            b
2000-01-01  3
2000-01-01  3
2000-01-01  3
2000-01-02  4
2000-01-02  4
2000-01-02  4

In [18]: left.join(right)
Out[18]: 
            a  b
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-01  1  3
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4
2000-01-02  2  4

Answer 2

It sounds like maybe you want pandas.concat? merge and join do, well, joins, which means they will give you something based around the Cartesian product of the two inputs, but it sounds like you just want to paste them together into one big table.

Edit: did you try concat with axis=1? It seems to do what you're asking for:

>>> print x
          A         B         C
0  0.155614 -0.252148  0.861163
1  0.973517  1.156465 -0.458846
2  2.504356 -0.356371 -0.737842
3  0.012994  1.785123  0.161667
4  0.574578  0.123689  0.017598
>>> print y
         A2        B2        C2
0 -0.280993  1.278750 -0.704449
1  0.140282  1.955322 -0.953826
2  0.581997 -0.239829  2.227069
3 -0.876146 -1.955199 -0.155030
4 -0.518593 -2.630978  0.333264
>>> print pandas.concat([x, y], axis=1)
          A         B         C        A2        B2        C2
0  0.155614 -0.252148  0.861163 -0.280993  1.278750 -0.704449
1  0.973517  1.156465 -0.458846  0.140282  1.955322 -0.953826
2  2.504356 -0.356371 -0.737842  0.581997 -0.239829  2.227069
3  0.012994  1.785123  0.161667 -0.876146 -1.955199 -0.155030
4  0.574578  0.123689  0.017598 -0.518593 -2.630978  0.333264