Change column values to column headers in pandas

Question

I have the following code, which takes the values in one column of a pandas dataframe and makes them the columns of a new data frame. The values in the first column of the d

Answer 1

This looks like a job for pivot:

import pandas as pd
oldcols = {'col1':['a','a','b','b'], 'col2':['c','d','c','d'], 'col3':[1,2,3,4]}
a = pd.DataFrame(oldcols)  

newf = a.pivot(index='col1', columns='col2')
print(newf)

yields

      col3   
col2     c  d
col1         
a        1  2
b        3  4

If you don't want a MultiIndex column, you can drop the col3 using:

newf.columns = newf.columns.droplevel(0)

which would then yield

col2  c  d
col1      
a     1  2
b     3  4