KeyError while accessing multi index dataframe in Pandas

Question

I have the following dataframe having "Location" and "Name" as the index.

Location  Name   Cost   Item Purchased                
Store 1   Chris  22.5   Dog Food
          Kevyn   2.5   Kitty Litter
Store 2   Vinod   5.0   Bird Seed

I can access df.loc["Store 1"] But df.loc["Store 1"]["Kevyn"] is giving me KeyError. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

You're using some incorrect chained indexing here, where you want to be indexing both levels of the MultiIndex with something like

df.loc['Store 1', 'Kevyn']

See Basic indexing on axis with MultiIndex in the docs.

Answer 2

You need to pass a tuple:

In [100]:
df.loc[('Store 1', 'Kevyn'),:]

Out[100]:
Cost                       2.5
Item Purchased    Kitty Litter
Name: (Store 1, Kevyn), dtype: object

The docs detail how to index