How to check differences between column values in pandas?

Question

I'm manually comparing two or three rows very similar using pandas. Is there a more automated way to do this? I would like a better method than using '=='.

Answer 1

https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.diff.html

See if this will satisfy your needs.

df['sales_diff'] = df['sales'].diff()

The above code snippet creates a new column in your data frame, which contains the difference between the previous row by default. You can screw around with the parameters (axis) to compare rows or columns and you can change (period) to compare to a specific row or column.