Pandas merge two dataframes with different columns

Question

I\'m surely missing something simple here. Trying to merge two dataframes in pandas that have mostly the same column names, but the right dataframe has some columns that the

Answer 1

I had this problem today using any of concat, append or merge, and I got around it by adding a helper column sequentially numbered and then doing an outer join

helper=1
for i in df1.index:
    df1.loc[i,'helper']=helper
    helper=helper+1
for i in df2.index:
    df2.loc[i,'helper']=helper
    helper=helper+1
df1.merge(df2,on='helper',how='outer')

Answer 2

I think in this case concat is what you want:

In [12]:

pd.concat([df,df1], axis=0, ignore_index=True)
Out[12]:
   attr_1  attr_2  attr_3  id  quantity
0       0       1     NaN   1        20
1       1       1     NaN   2        23
2       1       1     NaN   3        19
3       0       0     NaN   4        19
4       1     NaN       0   5         8
5       0     NaN       1   6        13
6       1     NaN       1   7        20
7       1     NaN       1   8        25

by passing axis=0 here you are stacking the df's on top of each other which I believe is what you want then producing NaN value where they are absent from their respective dfs.