Pandas: A clean way to initialize data frame with a list of namedtuple

Question

I\'m new to pandas, therefore perhaps I\'m asking a very stupid question. Normally initialization of data frame in pandas would be column-wise, where I put in dict with key

Answer 1

The function you want is from_records.

For namedtuple instances you must pass the _fields property of the namedtuple to the columns parameter of from_records, in addition to a list of namedtuples:

df = pd.DataFrame.from_records(
   [namedtuple_instance1, namedtuple_instance2],
   columns=namedtuple_type._fields
)

If you have dictionaries, you can use it directly as

df = pd.DataFrame.from_records([dict(a=1, b=2), dict(a=2, b=3)])

Answer 2

In a similar vein to creating a Series from a namedtuple, you can use the _fields attribute:

In [11]: Point = namedtuple('Point', ['x', 'y'])

In [12]: points = [Point(1, 2), Point(3, 4)]

In [13]: pd.DataFrame(points, columns=Point._fields)
Out[13]: 
   x  y
0  1  2
1  3  4

Assuming they are all of the same type, in this example all Points.