Removing index column in pandas when reading a csv

Question:

I have the following code which imports a CSV file. There are 3 columns and I want to set the first two of them to variables. When I set the second column to the variable “efficiency” the index column is also tacked on. How can I get rid of the index column?

df = pd.DataFrame.from_csv('Efficiency_Data.csv', header=0, parse_dates=False)
energy = df.index
efficiency = df.Efficiency
print efficiency

I tried using

del df['index']

after I set

energy = df.index

which I found in another post but that results in “KeyError: ‘index’ “

Asked By: Bogdan Janiszewski

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Answers:

you can specify which column is an index in your csv file by using index_col parameter of from_csv function
if this doesn’t solve you problem please provide example of your data

Answered By: yemu

DataFrames and Series always have an index. Although it displays alongside the column(s), it is not a column, which is why del df['index'] did not work.

If you want to replace the index with simple sequential numbers, use df.reset_index().

To get a sense for why the index is there and how it is used, see e.g. 10 minutes to Pandas.

Answered By: Dan Allan

If your problem is same as mine where you just want to reset the column headers from 0 to column size. Do

df = pd.DataFrame(df.values);

EDIT:

Not a good idea if you have heterogenous data types. Better just use

df.columns = range(len(df.columns))
Answered By: Bhanu Pratap Singh

When writing to and reading from a CSV file include the argument index=False and index_col=False, respectively. Follows an example:

To write:

 df.to_csv(filename, index=False)

and to read from the csv

df.read_csv(filename, index_col=False)  

This should prevent the issue so you don’t need to fix it later.

Answered By: Steve

You can set one of the columns as an index in case it is an “id” for example.
In this case the index column will be replaced by one of the columns you have chosen.

df.set_index('id', inplace=True)
Answered By: Natheer Alabsi

df.reset_index(drop=True, inplace=True)

Answered By: Subhojit Mukherjee

One thing that i do is df=df.reset_index()
then df=df.drop(['index'],axis=1)

Answered By: Lord Varis

To remove or not to create the default index column, you can set the index_col to False and keep the header as Zero. Here is an example of how you can do it.

recording = pd.read_excel("file.xls",
                     sheet_name= "sheet1",
                     header= 0,
                     index_col= False)

The header = 0 will make your attributes to headers and you can use it later for calling the column.

Answered By: Ali Taheri

It works for me this way:

Df = data.set_index("name of the column header to start as index column" )

Answered By: Francis Ezeani
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