Pandas drop duplicates; values in reverse order

Question

I\'m trying to find a way to utilize pandas drop_duplicates() to recognize that rows are duplicates when the values are in reverse order.

An example is

Answer 1

First sort by rows with apply sorted and then drop_duplicates:

df = df.apply(sorted, axis=1).drop_duplicates()
print (df)
   Item1   Item2
0  Apple  Banana

---

#if need specify columns
cols = ['Item1','Item2']
df[cols] = df[cols].apply(sorted, axis=1)
df = df.drop_duplicates(subset=cols)
print (df)
   Item1   Item2
0  Apple  Banana

Another solution with numpy.sort and DataFrame constructor:

df = pd.DataFrame(np.sort(df.values, axis=1), index=df.index, columns=df.columns)
       .drop_duplicates()
print (df)
   Item1   Item2
0  Apple  Banana