How to create variables based on column names in dataframe?

Question

I wanted to create variables in python based on the column names of my dataframe. Not sure if this is possible as I am quite new to Python. Lets say my df looks like this:

ID  Date         Name    Counts
1   04/04/2018   JUOM    150
2   05/04/2018   1XMK    22
3   05/04/2018   N2IS    130

How could I create one variable where I can reference the Date and the Name columns from this dataframe?

Answer 1

If you want a variable x assigned to the columns Date and Name, you can subset the data frame with the using df[['col1','col2',...]] syntax. The outer brackets are the indexer operation of pandas data frame object, while the inner brackets create a list of desired column names.

x= df[['Date','Name']]

Which returns:

         Date  Name
0  04/04/2018  JUOM
1  05/04/2018  1XMK
2  05/04/2018  N2IS

If you don't want to have the data in a data frame, you could get the data with .values property.

x= df[['Date','Name']].values

array([['04/04/2018', 'JUOM'],
       ['05/04/2018', '1XMK'],
       ['05/04/2018', 'N2IS']], dtype=object)

If you are using pandas version 0.24.0, they recommend replacing .values with to_numpy().

Answer 2

You can do this:

var1 = df.columns[0]
var2 = df.columns[1]

The result:

var1 = ID

var2 = Date