Index pandas DataFrame by column numbers, when column names are integers
This is exactly the purpose of iloc, see here
In [37]: df
Out[37]:
10 11 12 13 14 15 16
x 0 1 2 3 4 5 6
y 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
u 14 15 16 17 18 19 20
z 21 22 23 24 25 26 27
w 28 29 30 31 32 33 34
In [38]: df.iloc[:,[1,3]]
Out[38]:
11 13
x 1 3
y 8 10
u 15 17
z 22 24
w 29 31
This is certainly one of those things that feels like a bug but is really a design decision (I think).
A few work around options:
rename the columns with their positions as their name:
df.columns = arange(0,len(df.columns))
Another way is to get names from df.columns
:
print df[ df.columns[[1,3]] ]
11 13
x 1 3
y 8 10
u 15 17
z 22 24
w 29 31
I suspect this is the most appealing as it just requires adding a wee bit of code and not changing any column names.
Just convert the headers from integer to string. This should be done almost always as a best practice when working with pandas datasets to avoid surprise
df.columns = df.columns.map(str)