Populating pandas column inisde a function

Question

I have a dataframe and I want to create and populate the column with values inside the function process().

import random
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame()

def process():
    global df
    df['z'] = random.randint(0, 100)
    
for i in range(5):
    process()

print(df)

The expected output:

    z
0   21
1   83
2   29
3   10
4   43

Currently I get an empty dataframe with column z printed.

Update:

The following line will create and populate the column values.

df.loc[len(df), 'z'] = random.randint(0, 100)

Answer 1

It looks like what you want could be simplified to:

def process():
    return random.randint(0, 100)
    
df = pd.DataFrame({'z': [process() for i in range(5)]})

example output:

    z
0  53
1  68
2  45
3  56
4  23

Answer 2

I assume you just need to create a new column with 5 values, if there's any updates from your questions, feel free to comment.

import random
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame()

def process(column):
    global df
    df[column]= [random.randint(0,100) for i in range(5)]


process("z")
print(df)

    z
0  20
1  85
2  43
3  35
4  55