pandas column names to list

Question

According to this thread: SO: Column names to list

It should be straightforward to do convert the column names to a list. But if i do:

df.columns.tolist()

I do get:

[u'q_igg', u'q_hcp', u'c_igg', u'c_hcp']

I know, i could get rid of the u and the ' . But i would like to just get the clean names as list without any hack around. Is that possible ?

Answer 1

Or, you could try:

df2 = df.columns.get_values()

which will give you:

array(['q_igg', 'q_hcp', 'c_igg', 'c_hcp'], dtype=object)

then:

df2.tolist()

which gives you:

['q_igg', 'q_hcp', 'c_igg']

Answer 2

The list [u'q_igg', u'q_hcp', u'c_igg', u'c_hcp'] contains Unicode strings: the u indicates that they're Unicode strings and the ' are enclosed around each string. You can now use these names in any way you'd like in your code. See Unicode HOWTO for more details on Unicode strings in Python 2.x.