Pandas how to find column contains a certain value

In this tutorial, we will learn how to find the index of a column that contains a certain value.

Example we have a dataframe with the following columns:

import pandas as pd
df = pd.DataFrame({
    'A': [1, 4, 7, 1, 4],
    'B': [2, 5, 8, 2, 5],
    'C': [3, 6, 9, 3, 6]
})

    A   B   C
0   1   2   3
1   4   5   6
2   7   8   9
4   1   2   3
5   4   5   6

Let us find the index of the column that contains the value 5.

Using np.where from numpy

The numpy function np.where can be used to find the index of a column that contains a certain value. The syntax is: numpy.where(condition[, x, y])

Parameters
conditionarray_like, bool
Where True, yield x, otherwise yield y.

x, y: array_like
Values from which to choose. x, y and condition need to be broadcastable to some shape.

Returns
out: ndarray
An array with elements from x where condition is True, and elements from y elsewhere.

For the above example, we can use the following code to find the index of the column B that contains the value 5.

import numpy as np
col_index = pd.DataFrame(np.where(df.eq(5))[1] + 1, columns=['col_index'])

Output:

   col_index
0          2
1          2