How to avoid Python/Pandas creating an index in a saved csv?

I am trying to save a csv to a folder after making some edits to the file.

Every time I use pd.to_csv('C:/Path of file.csv') the csv file has a separate column of indexes. I want to avoid printing the index to csv.

I tried:

pd.read_csv('C:/Path to file to edit.csv', index_col = False) 

And to save the file...

pd.to_csv('C:/Path to save edited file.csv', index_col = False) 

However, I still got the unwanted index column. How can I avoid this when I save my files?

6 Answers

Use index=False.

df.to_csv('your.csv', index=False) 

There are two ways to handle the situation where we do not want the index to be stored in csv file.

1. As others have stated you can use index=False while saving your
   dataframe to csv file.

   df.to_csv('file_name.csv',index=False)

2. Or you can save your dataframe as it is with an index, and while reading you just drop the column unnamed 0 containing your previous index.Simple!

   df.to_csv(' file_name.csv ')
df_new = pd.read_csv('file_name.csv').drop(['unnamed 0'],axis=1)

If you want no index, read file using:

import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', index_col=0) 

save it using

df.to_csv('file.csv', index=False) 

As others have stated, if you don't want to save the index column in the first place, you can use df.to_csv('processed.csv', index=False)

However, since the data you will usually use, have some sort of index themselves, let's say a 'timestamp' column, I would keep the index and load the data using it.

So, to save the indexed data, first set their index and then save the DataFrame:

df.set_index('timestamp') df.to_csv('processed.csv') 

Afterwards, you can either read the data with the index:

pd.read_csv('processed.csv', index_col='timestamp') 

or read the data, and then set the index:

pd.read_csv('filename.csv') pd.set_index('column_name') 

Another solution if you want to keep this column as index.

pd.read_csv('filename.csv', index_col='Unnamed: 0') 

If you want a good format next statement is the best:

dataframe_prediction.to_csv('filename.csv', sep=',', encoding='utf-8', index=False) 

In this case you have got a csv file with ',' as separate between columns and utf-8 format. In addition, numerical index won't appear.