Pandas - select column using other column value as column name

Question

I have a dataframe that contains a column, let's call it "names". "names" has the name of other columns. I would like to add a new column that would have for each row the value based on the column name contained on that "names" column.

Example:

Input dataframe: pd.DataFrame.from_dict({"a": [1, 2, 3,4], "b": [-1,-2,-3,-4], "names":['a','b','a','b']})

  a  |  b  | names |
 --- | --- | ----  |
  1  |  -1 | 'a'   |
  2  |  -2 | 'b'   |
  3  |  -3 | 'a'   |
  4  |  -4 | 'b'   |

Output dataframe: pd.DataFrame.from_dict({"a": [1, 2, 3,4], "b": [-1,-2,-3,-4], "names":['a','b','a','b'], "new_col":[1,-2,3,-4]})

  a  |  b  | names | new_col | 
 --- | --- | ----  | ------  |
  1  |  -1 | 'a'   |    1    |
  2  |  -2 | 'b'   |   -2    |
  3  |  -3 | 'a'   |    3    |
  4  |  -4 | 'b'   |   -4    |

Answer 1

You can use lookup:

df['new_col'] = df.lookup(df.index, df.names)
df
#   a    b  names   new_col
#0  1   -1      a   1
#1  2   -2      b   -2
#2  3   -3      a   3
#3  4   -4      b   -4

EDIT

lookup has been deprecated, here's the currently recommended solution:

idx, cols = pd.factorize(df['names'])
df.reindex(cols, axis=1).to_numpy()[np.arange(len(df)), idx]