Selecting a Single Column

df.loc[:, ['column name']]

cereal.loc[:, ['type']]

	type
0	Cold
1	Cold
2	Cold
...	...
74	Cold
75	Cold
76	Cold

77 rows × 1 columns

Something we often do in data analysis is obtain a single column from a dataframe. We can again use .loc[] to do this which would look something like this in general:

dataframe.loc[:, ['column name']]

So if we here want the column named type from our cereal dataframe we could use the syntax:

cereal.loc[:, ['type']]

This seems a bit long winded and since we do this type of thing often. Luckily, Pandas has provided a quicker syntax to use to do the same thing.

df[['column name']]

cereal[['type']]

	type
0	Cold
1	Cold
2	Cold
...	...
74	Cold
75	Cold
76	Cold

77 rows × 1 columns

Instead, selecting a single column can be done without using .loc[] and we can just specify the dataframe name, followed by double square brackets containing the column of interest.

cereal[['type']]

This makes the syntax for selecting the column type from the cereal dataframe very easy.

Let’s apply what we learned!