How to slice a Pandas Data Frame by position?

Question

I have a Pandas Data Frame object that has 1000 rows and 10 columns. I would simply like to slice the Data Frame and take the first 10 rows. How can I do this? I've been trying to use this:

>>> df.shape (1000,10) >>> my_slice = df.ix[10,:] >>> my_slice.shape (10,) 

Shouldn't my_slice be the first ten rows, ie. a 10 x 10 Data Frame? How can I get the first ten rows, such that my_slice is a 10x10 Data Frame object? Thanks.

Answer 1

http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.DataFrame.head.html?highlight=head#pandas.DataFrame.head

df2 = df.head(10) 

should do the trick

Answer 2

You can also do as a convenience:

df[:10]