Question

This is likely very simple but I can’t figure out what’s wrong.
I am having trouble listing elements of a DataFrame. Sometimes the elements of a DataFrame are listed and sometimes it’s simply a description of the number and types of the data columns.
I know that the number of rows is a factor but even when I have only a few rows, I only get the description back.
For example:
If I have a DataFrame called ‘allpledges’, it gives me a description

In [5]:

allpledges

Out[5]:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 305384 entries, 0 to 305383
Data columns:
Pledge#       305384  non-null values
Source        305384  non-null values
Date          305384  non-null values
Break         305384  non-null values
Progcode      237002  non-null values

Which is understandable because it’s too many rows to display.
But when I try to view a few, it still gives me the same thing

In [13]:

allpledges[:5]

Out[13]:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 5 entries, 0 to 4
Data columns:
Pledge#       5  non-null values
Source        5  non-null values
Date          5  non-null values
Break         5  non-null values
Progcode      0  non-null values

When what I wanted was the top five rows listed out. I have seen this done in tutorials, but can’t figure out what I am doing wrong here.

Answer 1

These settings are controlled in the options (I suspect you’re looking for max_rows or max_columns, but there are many options seen in the set_options docstring):

In [11]: pd.options.display.max_columns
Out[11]: 20

And change them using set_option:

In [12]: pd.set_option('display.max_columns', 10)

If the DataFrame either has more columns or more rows than these settings it will abbreviate.

For example:

In [17]: df = pd.DataFrame(pd.np.arange(10).reshape(5,2))

In [18]: pd.set_option('display.max_rows', 4)

In [19]: df
Out[19]: 
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 5 entries, 0 to 4
Data columns:
0    5  non-null values
1    5  non-null values
dtypes: int64(2