How to reorder indexed rows based on a list in Pandas data frame

Question

I have a data frame that looks like this:

company  Amazon  Apple  Yahoo name A             0    130      0 C           173      0      0 Z             0      0    150 

It was created using this code:

import pandas as pd df = pd.DataFrame({'name' : ['A', 'Z','C'],                    'company' : ['Apple', 'Yahoo','Amazon'],                    'height' : [130, 150,173]})  df = df.pivot(index="name", columns="company", values="height").fillna(0) 

What I want to do is to sort the row (with index name) according to a predefined list ["Z", "C", "A"]. Resulting in this :

company  Amazon  Apple  Yahoo name Z             0      0    150 C           173      0      0 A             0    130      0 

How can I achieve that?

Answer 1

You could set index on predefined order using reindex like

In [14]: df.reindex(["Z", "C", "A"]) Out[14]: company  Amazon  Apple  Yahoo Z             0      0    150 C           173      0      0 A             0    130      0 

However, if it's alphabetical order, you could use sort_index(ascending=False)

In [12]: df.sort_index(ascending=False) Out[12]: company  Amazon  Apple  Yahoo name Z             0      0    150 C           173      0      0 A             0    130      0 

Like pointed below, you need to assign it to some variable

In [13]: df = df.sort_index(ascending=False)