Pythonic type hints with pandas?

Question

Let's take a simple function that takes a str and returns a dataframe:

import pandas as pd def csv_to_df(path):     return pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=1, sep='\t', comment='#') 

What is the recommended pythonic way of adding type hints to this function?

If I ask python for the type of a DataFrame it returns pandas.core.frame.DataFrame. The following won't work though, as it'll tell me that pandas is not defined.

 def csv_to_df(path: str) -> pandas.core.frame.DataFrame:      return pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=1, sep='\t', comment='#') 

Answer 1

Why not just use pd.DataFrame?

import pandas as pd def csv_to_df(path: str) -> pd.DataFrame:     return pd.read_csv(path, skiprows=1, sep='\t', comment='#') 

Result is the same:

> help(csv_to_df) Help on function csv_to_df in module __main__: csv_to_df(path:str) -> pandas.core.frame.DataFrame