Pandas dataframe get first row of each group

>>> df.groupby('id').first()
     value
id        
1    first
2    first
3    first
4   second
5    first
6    first
7   fourth

If you need id as column:

>>> df.groupby('id').first().reset_index()
   id   value
0   1   first
1   2   first
2   3   first
3   4  second
4   5   first
5   6   first
6   7  fourth

To get n first records, you can use head():

>>> df.groupby('id').head(2).reset_index(drop=True)
    id   value
0    1   first
1    1  second
2    2   first
3    2  second
4    3   first
5    3   third
6    4  second
7    4   fifth
8    5   first
9    6   first
10   6  second
11   7  fourth
12   7   fifth

If you only need the first row from each group we can do with drop_duplicates, Notice the function default method keep='first'.

df.drop_duplicates('id')
Out[1027]: 
    id   value
0    1   first
3    2   first
5    3   first
9    4  second
11   5   first
12   6   first
15   7  fourth

This will give you the second row of each group (zero indexed, nth(0) is the same as first()):

df.groupby('id').nth(1) 

Documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/groupby.html#taking-the-nth-row-of-each-group

I'd suggest to use .nth(0) rather than .first() if you need to get the first row.

The difference between them is how they handle NaNs, so .nth(0) will return the first row of group no matter what are the values in this row, while .first() will eventually return the first not NaN value in each column.

E.g. if your dataset is :

df = pd.DataFrame({'id' : [1,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4],
            'value'  : ["first","second","third", np.NaN,
                        "second","first","second","third",
                        "fourth","first","second"]})

>>> df.groupby('id').nth(0)
    value
id        
1    first
2    NaN
3    first
4    first

And

>>> df.groupby('id').first()
    value
id        
1    first
2    second
3    first
4    first