Python Pandas merge multiple columns into a dictionary column

Question

I have a dataframe (df_full) like so:

|cust_id|address    |store_id|email        |sales_channel|category|
-------------------------------------------------------------------
|1234567|123 Main St|10SjtT  |[email protected]|ecom         |direct  |
|4567345|345 Main St|10SjtT  |[email protected]|instore      |direct  |
|1569457|876 Main St|51FstT  |[email protected]|ecom         |direct  |

and I would like to combine the last 4 fields into one metadata field that is a dictionary like so:

|cust_id|address    |metadata                                                                                     |
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
|1234567|123 Main St|{'store_id':'10SjtT', 'email':'[email protected]','sales_channel':'ecom', 'category':'direct'}   |
|4567345|345 Main St|{'store_id':'10SjtT', 'email':'[email protected]','sales_channel':'instore', 'category':'direct'}|
|1569457|876 Main St|{'store_id':'51FstT', 'email':'[email protected]','sales_channel':'ecom', 'category':'direct'}   |

is that possible? I've seen a few solutions around on stack overflow but none of them address combining more than 2 fields into a dictionary field.

Answer 1

Use to_dict,

columns = ['store_id', 'email', 'sales_channel', 'category']
df['metadata'] = df[columns].to_dict(orient='records')

And if you want to drop original columns,

df = df.drop(columns=columns)