move column in pandas dataframe

Question

I have the following dataframe:

   a  b   x  y 0  1  2   3 -1 1  2  4   6 -2 2  3  6   9 -3 3  4  8  12 -4 

How can I move columns b and x such that they are the last 2 columns in the dataframe? I would like to specify b and x by name, but not the other columns.

Answer 1

You can rearrange columns directly by specifying their order:

df = df[['a', 'y', 'b', 'x']] 

In the case of larger dataframes where the column titles are dynamic, you can use a list comprehension to select every column not in your target set and then append the target set to the end.

>>> df[[c for c in df if c not in ['b', 'x']]         + ['b', 'x']]    a  y  b   x 0  1 -1  2   3 1  2 -2  4   6 2  3 -3  6   9 3  4 -4  8  12 

To make it more bullet proof, you can ensure that your target columns are indeed in the dataframe:

cols_at_end = ['b', 'x'] df = df[[c for c in df if c not in cols_at_end]          + [c for c in cols_at_end if c in df]]