How to sort a dataFrame in python pandas by two or more columns?

Question

Suppose I have a dataframe with columns a, b and c, I want to sort the dataframe by column b in ascending order, and by column c in descending order, how do I do this?

Answer 1

As of the 0.17.0 release, the sort method was deprecated in favor of sort_values. sort was completely removed in the 0.20.0 release. The arguments (and results) remain the same:

df.sort_values(['a', 'b'], ascending=[True, False]) 

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You can use the ascending argument of sort:

df.sort(['a', 'b'], ascending=[True, False]) 

For example:

In [11]: df1 = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randint(1, 5, (10,2)), columns=['a','b'])  In [12]: df1.sort(['a', 'b'], ascending=[True, False]) Out[12]:    a  b 2  1  4 7  1  3 1  1  2 3  1  2 4  3  2 6  4  4 0  4  3 9  4  3 5  4  1 8  4  1 

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As commented by @renadeen

Sort isn't in place by default! So you should assign result of the sort method to a variable or add inplace=True to method call.

that is, if you want to reuse df1 as a sorted DataFrame:

df1 = df1.sort(['a', 'b'], ascending=[True, False]) 

or

df1.sort(['a', 'b'], ascending=[True, False], inplace=True)