Iterate through a dataframe by index

Question

I have a dataframe called staticData which looks like this:

                         narrow_sector       broad_sector country exchange  \
unique_id                                                                    
BBG.MTAA.STM.S          Semiconductors         Technology      CH     MTAA   
BBG.MTAA.CNHI.S  Machinery-Diversified         Industrial      GB     MTAA   
BBG.MTAA.FCA.S      Auto Manufacturers  Consumer Cyclical      GB     MTAA   
BBG.MTAA.A2A.S                Electric          Utilities      IT     MTAA   
BBG.MTAA.ACE.S                Electric          Utilities      IT     MTAA

I am trying to iterate through the dataframe row by row picking out two bits of information the index (unique_id) and the exchange. I am having a problem iterating on the index. Please see my code:

for i, row in staticData.iterrows():
        
    unique_id = staticData.ix[i]

    exchange = row['exchange']

I have tried unique_id = row['unique_id'], but can't get it to work...

I am trying to return say for row1

unique_id = BBG.MTAA.STM.S
exchange = MTAA

score 29 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 26 '16 at 12:19

You want the following:

for i, row in staticData.iterrows():
    unique_id = i
    exchange = row['exchange']

i will be the index label value

Example:

In [57]:
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(5,3), index=list('abcde'), columns=list('fgh'))
df

Out[57]:
          f         g         h
a -0.900835 -0.913989 -0.624536
b -0.854091  0.286364 -0.869539
c  1.090133 -0.771667  1.258372
d -0.721753 -0.329211  0.479295
e  0.520786  0.273722  0.824172

In [62]:
for i, row in df.iterrows():
    print('index: ', i, 'col g:', row['g'])

index:  a col g: -0.913988608754
index:  b col g: 0.286363847188
index:  c col g: -0.771666520074
index:  d col g: -0.329211394286
index:  e col g: 0.273721527592

score 9 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 26 '16 at 12:56

9

May be more pandasian way?

staticData.apply((lambda x: (x.name, x['exchange'])), axis=1)

answered Apr 26 '16 at 12:56

knagaev

2,897
16
20

can we get index of the row with apply method? – Varun Suresh Kumar May 01 '23 at 04:59

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Feb 21 '23 at 18:18

First of all, it's anti-pattern to iterate through a dataframe because in 99% of the time, there's a vectorized method much more efficient for the task you're trying to do. That said, if you have to loop, some methods are more efficient than others.

To iterate through a specific column, use items():

for idx, value in df['exchange'].items():
    # do something

To iterate through a dataframe, use itertuples():

# e.g. to access the `exchange` values as in the OP
for idx, *row in df.itertuples():
    print(idx, row.exchange)

items() creates a zip object from a Series, while itertuples() creates namedtuples where you can refer to specific values by the column name.

itertuples is much faster than iterrows. For example, for a frame with 50000 rows, iterrows takes 2.4 sec to loop over each row, while itertuples takes 62 ms (approx. 40 times faster). Since this a loop, this difference is constant and if your dataframe is larger, we're looking at a difference between a few seconds vs a few minutes.

df = pd.concat([df]*10000, ignore_index=True)

%timeit list(df.itertuples())
# 62 ms ± 11 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)

%timeit list(df.iterrows())
# 2.42 s ± 162 ms per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10 loops each)

Iterate through a dataframe by index

3 Answers3