"Piping" output from one function to another using Python infix syntax

I would argue strongly against doing this or any of the answers suggested here and just implement a pipe function in standard python code, without operator trickery, decorators or what not:

def pipe(first, *args):
  for fn in args:
    first = fn(first)
  return first

See my answer here for more background: https://stackoverflow.com/a/60621554/2768350

Overloading operators, involving external libraries and what not serve to make the code less readable, less maintainable, less testable and less pythonic. If I want to do some kind of pipe in python, I would not want to do more than pipe(input, fn1, fn2, fn3). Thats the most readable & robust solution I can think of. If someone in our company committed operator overloading or new dependencies to production just to do a pipe, it would get immediately reverted and they would be sentenced to doing QA checks the rest of the week :D If you really really really must use some sort of operator for pipe, then maybe you have bigger problems and Python is not the right language for your use case...

You can use sspipe library, and use the following syntax:

from sspipe import p
df = df | p(select, 'one') \
        | p(rename, one = 'new_one')

While I can't help mentioning that using dplyr in Python might the closest thing to having in dplyr in Python (it has the rshift operator, but as a gimmick), I'd like to also point out that the pipe operator might only be necessary in R because of its use of generic functions rather than methods as object attributes. Method chaining gives you essentially the same without having to override operators:

dataf = (DataFrame(mtcars).
         filter('gear>=3').
         mutate(powertoweight='hp*36/wt').
         group_by('gear').
         summarize(mean_ptw='mean(powertoweight)'))

Note wrapping the chain between a pair of parenthesis lets you break it into multiple lines without the need for a trailing \ on each line.

It is hard to implement this using the bitwise or operator because pandas.DataFrame implements it. If you don't mind replacing | with >>, you can try this:

import pandas as pd

def select(df, *args):
    cols = [x for x in args]
    return df[cols]


def rename(df, **kwargs):
    for name, value in kwargs.items():
        df = df.rename(columns={'%s' % name: '%s' % value})
    return df


class SinkInto(object):
    def __init__(self, function, *args, **kwargs):
        self.args = args
        self.kwargs = kwargs
        self.function = function

    def __rrshift__(self, other):
        return self.function(other, *self.args, **self.kwargs)

    def __repr__(self):
        return "<SinkInto {} args={} kwargs={}>".format(
            self.function, 
            self.args, 
            self.kwargs
        )

df = pd.DataFrame({'one' : [1., 2., 3., 4., 4.],
                   'two' : [4., 3., 2., 1., 3.]})

Then you can do:

>>> df
   one  two
0    1    4
1    2    3
2    3    2
3    4    1
4    4    3

>>> df = df >> SinkInto(select, 'one') \
            >> SinkInto(rename, one='new_one')
>>> df
   new_one
0        1
1        2
2        3
3        4
4        4

In Python 3 you can abuse unicode:

>>> print('\u01c1')
ǁ
>>> ǁ = SinkInto
>>> df >> ǁ(select, 'one') >> ǁ(rename, one='new_one')
   new_one
0        1
1        2
2        3
3        4
4        4

[update]

Thanks for your response. Would it be possible to make a separate class (like SinkInto) for each function to avoid having to pass the functions as an argument?

How about a decorator?

def pipe(original):
    class PipeInto(object):
        data = {'function': original}

        def __init__(self, *args, **kwargs):
            self.data['args'] = args
            self.data['kwargs'] = kwargs

        def __rrshift__(self, other):
            return self.data['function'](
                other, 
                *self.data['args'], 
                **self.data['kwargs']
            )

    return PipeInto


@pipe
def select(df, *args):
    cols = [x for x in args]
    return df[cols]


@pipe
def rename(df, **kwargs):
    for name, value in kwargs.items():
        df = df.rename(columns={'%s' % name: '%s' % value})
    return df

Now you can decorate any function that takes a DataFrame as the first argument:

>>> df >> select('one') >> rename(one='first')
   first
0      1
1      2
2      3
3      4
4      4

Python is awesome!

I know that languages like Ruby are "so expressive" that it encourages people to write every program as new DSL, but this is kind of frowned upon in Python. Many Pythonists consider operator overloading for a different purpose as a sinful blasphemy.

[update]

User OHLÁLÁ is not impressed:

The problem with this solution is when you are trying to call the function instead of piping. – OHLÁLÁ

You can implement the dunder-call method:

def __call__(self, df):
    return df >> self

And then:

>>> select('one')(df)
   one
0  1.0
1  2.0
2  3.0
3  4.0
4  4.0

Looks like it is not easy to please OHLÁLÁ:

In that case you need to call the object explicitly:
select('one')(df) Is there a way to avoid that? – OHLÁLÁ

Well, I can think of a solution but there is a caveat: your original function must not take a second positional argument that is a pandas dataframe (keyword arguments are ok). Lets add a __new__ method to our PipeInto class inside the docorator that tests if the first argument is a dataframe, and if it is then we just call the original function with the arguments:

def __new__(cls, *args, **kwargs):
    if args and isinstance(args[0], pd.DataFrame):
        return cls.data['function'](*args, **kwargs)
    return super().__new__(cls)

It seems to work but probably there is some downside I was unable to spot.

>>> select(df, 'one')
   one
0  1.0
1  2.0
2  3.0
3  4.0
4  4.0

>>> df >> select('one')
   one
0  1.0
1  2.0
2  3.0
3  4.0
4  4.0