Delete column from pandas DataFrame?

Question

When deleting a column in a DataFrame I use: del df['column_name']And this works great. Why can't I use the following? del df.column_name*As you can access the column/Series as `df.column_name`, I expect this to work.*

Answer 1

This is pretty much due to how the syntax is interpreted for the code that runs under the hood. *** del df['column_name'] *** is translated to *** df.__delitem__(column_name) *** which is a method that DataFrame can utilize. This is not the case for the other example - If you do ***del df.column_name *** you will have deleted the member variable and DataFrame can't handle its custom deletion.

Inner workings aside, for the purposes of deletion it is generally preferred to use *** drop ***

With *** drop *** you can delete multiple rows or columns at once, and you have the option to perform your deletion inplace or not. See below:

Reassigning the dataframe:

*** df = df.drop('column_name' , 1) ***

Where '1' refers to the column axis ('0' for row axis)

Performing the operation inplace:

*** df.drop('column_name, axis=1, inplace=True) ***

https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.drop.html