Key error when selecting columns in pandas dataframe after read_csv

Question

I'm trying to read in a CSV file into a pandas dataframe and select a column, but keep getting a key error.

The file reads in successfully and I can view the dataframe in an iPython notebook, but when I want to select a column any other than the first one, it throws a key error.

I am using this code:

import pandas as pd

transactions = pd.read_csv('transactions.csv',low_memory=False, delimiter=',', header=0, encoding='ascii')
transactions['quarter']

This is the file I'm working on: https://www.dropbox.com/s/81iwm4f2hsohsq3/transactions.csv?dl=0

Thank you!

Answer 1

use sep='\s*,\s*' so that you will take care of spaces in column-names:

transactions = pd.read_csv('transactions.csv', sep=r'\s*,\s*',
                           header=0, encoding='ascii', engine='python')

alternatively you can make sure that you don't have unquoted spaces in your CSV file and use your command (unchanged)

prove:

print(transactions.columns.tolist())

Output:

['product_id', 'customer_id', 'store_id', 'promotion_id', 'month_of_year', 'quarter', 'the_year', 'store_sales', 'store_cost', 'unit_sales', 'fact_count']

Answer 2

if you need to select multiple columns from dataframe use 2 pairs of square brackets eg.

df[["product_id","customer_id","store_id"]]