Pandas nested sort and NaN

Question

I'm trying to understand the expected behavior of DataFrame.sort on columns with NaN values.

Given this DataFrame:

In [36]: df
Out[36]: 
    a   b
0   1   9
1   2 NaN
2 NaN   5
3   1   2
4   6   5
5   8   4
6   4   5

Sorting using one column puts the NaN at the end, as expected:

In [37]: df.sort(columns="a")
Out[37]: 
    a   b
0   1   9
3   1   2
1   2 NaN
6   4   5
4   6   5
5   8   4
2 NaN   5

But nested sort doesn't behave as I would expect, leaving the NaN unsorted:

In [38]: df.sort(columns=["a","b"])
Out[38]: 
    a   b
3   1   2
0   1   9
1   2 NaN
2 NaN   5
6   4   5
4   6   5
5   8   4

Is there a way to make sure the NaNs in nested sort will appear at the end, per column?

Answer 1

Until fixed in Pandas, this is what I'm using for sorting for my needs, with a subset of the functionality of the original DataFrame.sort function. This will work for numerical values only:

def dataframe_sort(df, columns, ascending=True):
    a = np.array(df[columns])

    # ascending/descending array - -1 if descending, 1 if ascending
    if isinstance(ascending, bool):
        ascending = len(columns) * [ascending]
    ascending = map(lambda x: x and 1 or -1, ascending)

    ind = np.lexsort([ascending[i] * a[:, i] for i in reversed(range(len(columns)))])
    return df.iloc[[ind]]

Usage example:

In [4]: df
Out[4]: 
     a   b   c
10   1   9   7
11 NaN NaN   1
12   2 NaN   6
13 NaN   5   6
14   1   2   6
15   6   5 NaN
16   8   4   4
17   4   5   3

In [5]: dataframe_sort(df, ['a', 'c'], False)
Out[5]: 
     a   b   c
16   8   4   4
15   6   5 NaN
17   4   5   3
12   2 NaN   6
10   1   9   7
14   1   2   6
13 NaN   5   6
11 NaN NaN   1

In [6]: dataframe_sort(df, ['b', 'a'], [False, True])
Out[6]: 
     a   b   c
10   1   9   7
17   4   5   3
15   6   5 NaN
13 NaN   5   6
16   8   4   4
14   1   2   6
12   2 NaN   6
11 NaN NaN   1