Pandas DataFrame to List of Lists

Question

You could access the underlying array and call its tolist method:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2,3],[3,4,5]])
>>> lol = df.values.tolist()
>>> lol
[[1L, 2L, 3L], [3L, 4L, 5L]]

If the data has column and index labels that you want to preserve, there are a few options.

Example data:

>>> df = pd.DataFrame([[1,2,3],[3,4,5]], \
       columns=('first', 'second', 'third'), \
       index=('alpha', 'beta')) 
>>> df
       first  second  third
alpha      1       2      3
beta       3       4      5

The tolist() method described in other answers is useful but yields only the core data - which may not be enough, depending on your needs.

>>> df.values.tolist()
[[1, 2, 3], [3, 4, 5]]

One approach is to convert the DataFrame to json using df.to_json() and then parse it again. This is cumbersome but does have some advantages, because the to_json() method has some useful options.

>>> df.to_json()
{
  "first":{"alpha":1,"beta":3},
  "second":{"alpha":2,"beta":4},"third":{"alpha":3,"beta":5}
}

>>> df.to_json(orient='split')
{
 "columns":["first","second","third"],
 "index":["alpha","beta"],
 "data":[[1,2,3],[3,4,5]]
}

Cumbersome but may be useful.

The good news is that it's pretty straightforward to build lists for the columns and rows:

>>> columns = [df.index.name] + [i for i in df.columns]
>>> rows = [[i for i in row] for row in df.itertuples()]

This yields:

>>> print(f"columns: {columns}\nrows: {rows}") 
columns: [None, 'first', 'second', 'third']
rows: [['alpha', 1, 2, 3], ['beta', 3, 4, 5]]

If the None as the name of the index is bothersome, rename it:

df = df.rename_axis('stage')

Then:

>>> columns = [df.index.name] + [i for i in df.columns]
>>> print(f"columns: {columns}\nrows: {rows}") 

columns: ['stage', 'first', 'second', 'third']
rows: [['alpha', 1, 2, 3], ['beta', 3, 4, 5]]

I wanted to preserve the index, so I adapted the original answer to this solution:

list_df = df.reset_index().values.tolist()

Now you can paste it somewhere else (e.g. to paste into a Stack Overflow question) and latter recreate it:

pd.Dataframe(list_df, columns=['name1', ...])
pd.set_index(['name1'], inplace=True)

I don't know if it will fit your needs, but you can also do:

>>> lol = df.values
>>> lol
array([[1, 2, 3],
       [3, 4, 5]])

This is just a numpy array from the ndarray module, which lets you do all the usual numpy array things.

Maybe something changed but this gave back a list of ndarrays which did what I needed.

list(df.values)

I had this problem: how do I get the headers of the df to be in row 0 for writing them to row 1 in the excel (using xlsxwriter)? None of the proposed solutions worked, but they pointed me in the right direction. I just needed one line more of code

# get csv data
df = pd.read_csv(filename)

# combine column headers and list of lists of values
lol = [df.columns.tolist()] + df.values.tolist()