Pandas: join DataFrames on field with different names?

Question

According to this documentation I can only make a join between fields having the same name.

Do you know if it's possible to join two DataFrames on a field having different names?

The equivalent in SQL would be:

SELECT * FROM df1 LEFT OUTER JOIN df2   ON df1.id_key = df2.fk_key 

Answer 1

I think what you want is possible using merge. Pass in the keyword arguments for left_on and right_on to tell Pandas which column(s) from each DataFrame to use as keys:

pandas.merge(df1, df2, how='left', left_on=['id_key'], right_on=['fk_key']) 

The documentation describes this in more detail on this page.