Get row-index values of Pandas DataFrame as list?

If you're only getting these to manually pass into df.set_index(), that's unnecessary. Just directly do df.set_index['your_col_name', drop=False], already.

It's very rare in pandas that you need to get an index as a Python list (unless you're doing something pretty funky, or else passing them back to NumPy), so if you're doing this a lot, it's a code smell that you're doing something wrong.

To get the index values as a list/list of tuples for Index/MultiIndex do:

df.index.values.tolist()  # an ndarray method, you probably shouldn't depend on this

or

list(df.index.values)  # this will always work in pandas