Renaming Pandas DataFrame columns that are numbers

Question

I have a DataFrame that has integers for column names that looks like this:

      1     2     3     4
 Red  7     3     2     9
 Blue 3     1     6     4

I'd like to rename the columns. I tried using the following

df = df.rename(columns={'1': 'One', '2': 'Two', '3': 'Three', '4': 'Four'})

However that doesn't change the column names. Do I need to do something else to change column names when they are numbers?

Answer 1

You need to remove the quotes:

df = df.rename(columns={1: 'One', 2: 'Two', 3: 'Three', 4: 'Four'})

Answer 2

What if you use the following:

>>> df.columns = ['One', 'Two', 'Three', 'Four']
>>> df
    One Two Three   Four
0   7   3   6       9
1   3   1   2       4

Answer 3

You can use two way to change columns name in Pandas DataFrame.

1. Changing the column name using df.columns attribute.

   df.columns = ['One', 'Two', 'Three', 'Four']

2. Using rename() function

   df = df.rename(columns={1: 'One', 2: 'Two', 3: 'Three', 4: 'Four'})