Pandas column access w/column names containing spaces

Old post, but may be interesting: an idea (which is destructive, but does the job if you want it quick and dirty) is to rename columns using underscores:

df1.columns = [c.replace(' ', '_') for c in df1.columns]

I think the default way is to use the bracket method instead of the dot notation.

import pandas as pd

df1 = pd.DataFrame({
    'key': ['b', 'b', 'a', 'c', 'a', 'a', 'b'],
    'dat a1': range(7)
})

df1['dat a1']

The other methods, like exposing it as an attribute are more for convenience.