Question

I am going through the ‘Python for Data Analysis’ book and having trouble in the ‘Example: 2012 Federal Election Commision Database’ section reading the data to a DataFrame. The trouble is that one of the columns of data is always being set as the index column, even when the index_col argument is set to None.

Here is the link to the data : http://www.fec.gov/disclosurep/PDownload.do.

Here is the loading code (to save time in the checking, I set the nrows=10):

import pandas as pd
fec = pd.read_csv('P00000001-ALL.csv',nrows=10,index_col=None)

To keep it short I am excluding the data column outputs, but here is my output (please not the Index values):

In [20]: fec

Out[20]:
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Index: 10 entries, C00410118 to C00410118
Data columns:
...
dtypes: float64(4), int64(3), object(11)

And here is the book’s output (again with data columns excluded):

In [13]: fec = read_csv('P00000001-ALL.csv')
In [14]: fec
Out[14]:
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 1001731 entries, 0 to 1001730
...
dtypes: float64(1), int64(1), object(14)

The Index values in my output are actually the first column of data in the file, which is then moving all the rest of the data to the left by one. Would anyone know how to prevent this column of data to be listed as an index? I would like to have the index just +1 increasing integers.

I am fairly new to python and pandas, so I apologize for any inconvenience. Thanks.

Answer 1

Quick Answer

Use index_col=False instead of index_col=None when you have delimiters at the end of each line to turn off index column inference and discard the last column.

More Detail

After looking at the data, there is a comma at the end of each line. And this quote (the documentation has been edited since the time this post was created):

index_col: column number, column name, or list of column numbers/names, to use as the index (row labels) of the resulting DataFrame. By default, it will number the rows without using any column, unless there is one more data column than there are headers, in which case the first column is taken as the index.

from the documentation shows that pandas believes you have n headers and n+1 data columns and is treating the first column as the index.

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EDIT 10/20/2014 – More information

I found another valuable entry that is specifically about trailing limiters and how to simply ignore them:

If a file has one more column of data than the number of column names, the first column will be used as the DataFrame’s row names: …

Ordinarily, you can achieve this behavior using the index_col option.

There are some exception cases when a file has been prepared with delimiters at the end of each data line, confusing the parser. To explicitly disable the index column inference and discard the last column, pass index_col=False: …