Equality in Pandas DataFrames - Column Order Matters?

Question

As part of a unit test, I need to test two DataFrames for equality. The order of the columns in the DataFrames is not important to me. However, it seems to matter to Panda

Answer 1

Sorting column only works if the row and column labels match across the frames. Say, you have 2 dataframes with identical values in cells but with different labels,then the sort solution will not work. I ran into this scenario when implementing k-modes clustering using pandas.

I got around it with a simple equals function to check cell equality(code below)

def frames_equal(df1,df2) :
    if not isinstance(df1,DataFrame) or not isinstance(df2,DataFrame) :
        raise Exception(
            "dataframes should be an instance of pandas.DataFrame")

    if df1.shape != df2.shape:
        return False

    num_rows,num_cols = df1.shape
    for i in range(num_rows):
       match = sum(df1.iloc[i] == df2.iloc[i])
       if match != num_cols :
          return False
   return True

Answer 2

The most common intent is handled like this:

def assertFrameEqual(df1, df2, **kwds ):
    """ Assert that two dataframes are equal, ignoring ordering of columns"""
    from pandas.util.testing import assert_frame_equal
    return assert_frame_equal(df1.sort_index(axis=1), df2.sort_index(axis=1), check_names=True, **kwds )

Of course see pandas.util.testing.assert_frame_equal for other parameters you can pass