Pandas DataFrame to List of Lists
If the data has column and index labels that you want to preserve, there are a few options.
Example data:
>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2,3],[3,4,5]], \
columns=('first', 'second', 'third'), \
index=('alpha', 'beta'))
>>> df
first second third
alpha 1 2 3
beta 3 4 5
The tolist()
method described in other answers is useful but yields only the core data - which may not be enough, depending on your needs.
>>> df.values.tolist()
[[1, 2, 3], [3, 4, 5]]
One approach is to convert the DataFrame
to json using df.to_json()
and then parse it again. This is cumbersome but does have some advantages, because the to_json()
method has some useful options.
>>> df.to_json()
{
"first":{"alpha":1,"beta":3},
"second":{"alpha":2,"beta":4},"third":{"alpha":3,"beta":5}
}
>>> df.to_json(orient='split')
{
"columns":["first","second","third"],
"index":["alpha","beta"],
"data":[[1,2,3],[3,4,5]]
}
Cumbersome but may be useful.
The good news is that it's pretty straightforward to build lists for the columns and rows:
>>> columns = [df.index.name] + [i for i in df.columns]
>>> rows = [[i for i in row] for row in df.itertuples()]
This yields:
>>> print(f"columns: {columns}\nrows: {rows}")
columns: [None, 'first', 'second', 'third']
rows: [['alpha', 1, 2, 3], ['beta', 3, 4, 5]]
If the None
as the name of the index is bothersome, rename it:
df = df.rename_axis('stage')
Then:
>>> columns = [df.index.name] + [i for i in df.columns]
>>> print(f"columns: {columns}\nrows: {rows}")
columns: ['stage', 'first', 'second', 'third']
rows: [['alpha', 1, 2, 3], ['beta', 3, 4, 5]]
You could access the underlying array and call its tolist
method:
>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2,3],[3,4,5]])
>>> lol = df.values.tolist()
>>> lol
[[1L, 2L, 3L], [3L, 4L, 5L]]
I wanted to preserve the index, so I adapted the original answer to this solution:
list_df = df.reset_index().values.tolist()
Now you can paste it somewhere else (e.g. to paste into a Stack Overflow question) and latter recreate it:
pd.Dataframe(list_df, columns=['name1', ...])
pd.set_index(['name1'], inplace=True)