Python - Pandas '.isin' on a list

I'm using Python 2.7 on Mac OSX Lion and Pandas 0.11.0 with the IPython shell.

I have a brief issue, using the data selection method .isin.

The issue is that I would like to use .isin on a list of items, so:

data = df[df[header[0]].isin(list)] 

I get the following error when I do this: KeyError: u'no item named '

I generate the initial list by calling a previously developed function. I tried using eval on the list, which seems to solve an issue that comes about when using raw_input and iterating over items within it - kinda trying to work out some of the issues I've been having when transitioning to IPython and Python 2.7 (originally used Python 3.3).

I also tried iterating over the list, by first doing:

data = df[df[header[0]].isin(list[0])] 

But that also returns: KeyError: u'no item named '

UPDATE: Here is the header:

 Unnamed: 0 9752 non-null values zipcode 9752 non-null values xcoord 9752 non-null values ycoord 9752 non-null values age_age5064 9752 non-null values age_age6574 9752 non-null values age_age75plus 9752 non-null values sex_female 9752 non-null values sex_male 9752 non-null values stage_early 9752 non-null values stage_late 9752 non-null values death_death 9752 non-null values death_not_death 9752 non-null values access 9752 non-null values dtypes: float64(2), int64(12) 

Also, I have a function I use to get the header, which makes things easier for me, the output looks like this:

['', 'zipcode', 'xcoord', 'ycoord', 'age_age5064', 'age_age6574', 'age_age75plus', 'sex_female', 'sex_male', 'stage_early', 'stage_late', 'death_death', 'death_not_death', 'access'] 

Which, actually, now that I think about it, may be what is causing the problem- although eval still would not fix it.

UPDATE 2:

So, initially, as you can see in the above .isin, I was using header[0], which was not right. I tried again using header[1], which is appropriate. I get the following error:

 TypeError: 'int' object is not iterable 

I also tried the regular list again and got this error:

TypeError: int() argument must be a string or a number, not 'list' 

Which, I guess, speaks more definitively to the issue....

1 Answer

Try to use df.columns as your header instead:

df[df[df.columns[1]].isin(list)]