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How to sort pandas's dataframe by specific column names? My dataframe columns look like this:

+-------+-------+-----+------+------+----------+
|movieId| title |drama|horror|action|  comedy  |
+-------+-------+-----+------+------+----------+
|                                              |
+-------+-------+-----+------+------+----------+

I would like to sort the dataframe only by columns = ['drama','horror','sci-fi','comedy']. So I get the following dataframe:

+-------+-------+------+------+------+----------+
|movieId| title |action|comedy|drama |  horror  |
+-------+-------+------+------+------+----------+
|                                               |
+-------+-------+------+------+------+----------+

I tried df = df.sort_index(axis=1) but it sorts all columns:

+-------+-------+------+------+-------+----------+
|action | comedy|drama |horror|movieId|  title   |
+-------+-------+------+------+-------+----------+
|                                                |
+-------+-------+------+------+-------+----------+
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  • I think your first example and second example are accidentally swapped Commented Aug 31, 2020 at 9:34
  • Does this answer your question? Set order of columns in pandas dataframe Commented Oct 10, 2023 at 10:29

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
1

You can explicitly rearrange columns like so

df[['movieId','title','drama','horror','sci-fi','comedy']]

If you have a lot of columns to sort alphabetically

df[np.concatenate([['movieId,title'],df.drop('movieId,title',axis=1).columns.sort_values()])]
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1 Comment

Not very practical for a larger amount of cols. Perhaps suggest a not hardcoded method to sort the genres?
1

Sorting all columns after second column and add first 2 columns:

c = df.columns[:2].tolist() + sorted(df.columns[2:].tolist())
print (c)
['movieId', 'title', 'action', 'comedy', 'drama', 'horror']

Last change order of columns by this list:

df1 = df[c]

Another idea is use DataFrame.sort_index but only for all columns without first 2 selected by DataFrame.iloc:

df.iloc[:, 2:] = df.iloc[:, 2:].sort_index(axis=1)
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Comments

0

Another way would be set movieId and title as index of the DataFrame and then sort index by the remaining column.

df.set_index(['movieId', 'title'], inplace=True)
df.sort_index(axis=1, inplace=True)
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1 Comment

And then reset_index. Why not.

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