difference between `header = None` and `header = 0` in pandas

Question

I was writing a code to read a csv file using pandas and I saw some weird functioning of the package. My file has column names which I want to ignore, so I use header = 0 or 'infer' instead of None. But I see something weird.

When I use None and I want to get a specific column, I just need to do df[column_index] but when I use 0 or 'infer', I need to do df.ix[:,column_index] to get the column otherwise, for df[column_index] I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/indexes/base.py", line 2525, in get_loc return self._engine.get_loc(key) File "pandas/_libs/index.pyx", line 117, in pandas._libs.index.IndexEngine.get_loc File "pandas/_libs/index.pyx", line 139, in pandas._libs.index.IndexEngine.get_loc File "pandas/_libs/hashtable_class_helper.pxi", line 1265, in pandas._libs.hashtable.PyObjectHashTable.get_item File "pandas/_libs/hashtable_class_helper.pxi", line 1273, in pandas._libs.hashtable.PyObjectHashTable.get_item KeyError: column_index

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 2139, in getitem return self._getitem_column(key) File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 2146, in _getitem_column return self._get_item_cache(key) File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/generic.py", line 1842, in _get_item_cache values = self._data.get(item) File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/internals.py", line 3843, in get loc = self.items.get_loc(item) File "/home/sarvagya/anaconda3/envs/tf/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/indexes/base.py", line 2527, in get_loc return self._engine.get_loc(self._maybe_cast_indexer(key)) File "pandas/_libs/index.pyx", line 117, in pandas._libs.index.IndexEngine.get_loc File "pandas/_libs/index.pyx", line 139, in pandas._libs.index.IndexEngine.get_loc File "pandas/_libs/hashtable_class_helper.pxi", line 1265, in pandas._libs.hashtable.PyObjectHashTable.get_item File "pandas/_libs/hashtable_class_helper.pxi", line 1273, in pandas._libs.hashtable.PyObjectHashTable.get_item KeyError: column_index

Can someone help with this? Why is this happening?

Answer 1

The difference pops up when working with a dataframe with header, so lets say your DataFrame df has header!

1. header=None pandas automatically assign the first row of df (which is the actual column names) to the first row, hence your columns no longer have names

2. header=0, pandas first deletes column names(header) and then assign new column names to them (only if you pass names = [........] while loading your file). read_csv( filepath, header = 0 , names = ['....' , '....' ...])

hope it helps!

Answer 2

Suppose you have a csv file like this student.csv where you have the names of columns in first row.

    id class marks
0   01 10    97
1   02 9     85
2   03 11    70

and you want to read this csv file, you can do this -

df = pd.read_csv('student.csv') 

or

df = pd.read_csv('student.csv', header=0)

these both statements will give the same format of csv file as above.

but if you try to use this -

df = pd.read_csv('student.csv', header=None)

pandas will assume that you don't have columns names in your file and will make it own and will print the csv file in this format.

    0   1    2
0   id class marks
1   01 10    97
2   02 9     85
3   03 11    70