Keep specific columns from a dataframe pandas

Question

I have a dataframe from an import csv using pandas. This dataframe has 160 variables and I would like to keep only 5, 9, 10, 46, 89.

I try this:

dataf2 = dataf[[5] + [9] + [10] + [46] + [89]]

but I take this error:

KeyError: '[ 5 9 10 46 89] not in index'

Answer 1

If you want to refer to columns not by their names but by their positions in the dataset, you need to use df.iloc:

dataf.iloc[:, [5, 9, 10, 46, 89]]

Row indices are specified before the comma, column indices are specified after the comma.

Answer 2

If the columns that you would like to keep are: 5, 9, 10, 46, 89, then you can index just these ones like so:

dataf2 = dataf[[5, 9, 10, 46, 89]]