In this tutorial, we will know how to get the column values in a Pandas Dataframe as a list.
Later, we will understand the same with the help of a few examples.
We can get the values in a pandas dataframe column as a list in the following ways:
- Using the
tolist()
function - Using the
list()
constructor
1. Using the tolist()
function :
By using the pandas series tolist()
function, we can create a list from the values of a pandas dataframe column.
We can directly apply the tolist()
function to the column as shown in the syntax below.
Syntax: dataFrameName['ColumnName'].tolist()
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2. Using list()
constructor:
In order to get the column values as a list we can pass the column values as an argument to the list()
constructor to create a list of the column values of the specified dataframe.
Syntax: list(dataFrameName["Column Name"])
Examples
We will now look at a few examples for a better understanding.
But before that, we will create a pandas dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial using the following command:
import pandas as pd # employee data data = { "Name": ["Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi"], "Age": [26, 28, 27, 32], "Department": ["Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR"] } # create pandas dataframe df = pd.DataFrame(data) # displays dataframe df
Output:

Example 1: Using the tolist()
function

# get the values of the "Name" column as a list df['Name'].tolist()
Output:
['Jim', 'Dwight', 'Angela', 'Tobi']
Example 2: Using the list()
constructor
# get the values of the "Name" column as a list list(df['Name'])
Output:
['Jim', 'Dwight', 'Angela', 'Tobi']
Summary
In this tutorial, we looked at how to get column values in a dataframe as a list. The following are the methods covered –
- Use the pandas series
tolist()
method to get the column values as a list. - Alternatively, you can select the column and pass it to the
list()
constructor to get its values as a list.
You might also be interested in –
- Pandas Category Column to a List
- Split Pandas column of lists into multiple columns
- Pandas DataFrame to a List in Python
- Get Column Names as List in Pandas DataFrame
- Check if a Column Exists in a Pandas DataFrame
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