Selecting rows from a dataframe is now one of the most common tasks anyone can do with pandas. In this tutorial, we will look at how to get the first row of a dataframe in pandas with the help of some examples.
Select the first row of a dataframe
Sometimes you may need to select the first row of a pandas data frame. There are multiple ways to select the first row of a dataframe. For example –
- Use the pandas dataframe
iloc
property. - Use the pandas
head()
function.
# Using the iloc[] Property to Retrieve the DataFrame’s First Row df.iloc[0] # Retrieve the First Row of All or a Specific Column Using the Head() Function df.head(1)
Examples
Let’s now look at some examples of using the above syntax.
First, we will create a pandas dataframe that we will be using throughout this tutorial.
import pandas as pd # employee data data = { "Name": ["Ram", "Sita", "Anita", "Abhinash"], "Age": [26, 28, 27, 32], "Department": ["Sales", "Sales", "Accounting", "HR"] } # create pandas dataframe df = pd.DataFrame(data) # display the dataframe df
Output:
Here, we created a dataframe with data with information on some employees in an office. You can see that the column names in the above dataframe are – “Name”, “Age”, and “Department”.
Example 1: Get the First Row of a Dataframe using the iloc[]
property
The Pandas module in Python defines the iloc[]
property which allows you to retrieve a specific column or row from the given DataFrame. Using the index values, we can quickly extract any specific value from a column or a row using the iloc[]
property.
The following code shows how to get the first row of a dataframe using the iloc[]
property.
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# Using the iloc[] to Retrieve the DataFrame’s First Row df.iloc[0]
Output:
Name Ram Age 26 Department Sales Name: 0, dtype: object
Pandas dataframe rows are indexed starting from 0. Thus, the index of the first row is 0. So, we passed the index value 0 inside the iloc[]
property to get the first row of the “df” DataFrame.
You can similarly get the first value (value in the first row) of a specific column in a pandas dataframe using the iloc[]
property.
# Retrieve the First Row of Name Column Using the iloc[] property df['Name'].iloc[0]
Output:
'Ram'
Example 2: Get the First Row of a Dataframe using the head()
function
The head()
function in pandas retrieves the first “n” rows of a dataframe. The top “n” (the default value is 5) DataFrame’s rows or series are returned using this method. To retrieve just the first row, we pass 1 as an argument to the head() function. The following code shows the same.
# Retrieve the First Row Using the Head() Function df.head(1)
Output:
By using the value of 1 inside the head function, we retrieved the first row. Just like with the iloc[]
property, we can also use the head()
function to retrieve the row of a specific column of the DataFrame.
# Retrieve the First Row of Name Column Using the Head() Function df['Name'].head(1)
Output:
0 Ram Name: Name, dtype: object
We get the first value in the “Name” column of the above dataframe.
Summary
In this tutorial, we looked at how to access the first row of a pandas dataframe using the following methods –
- Using the
iloc[]
property. - Using the
head()
function.
We also looked at how to get the value in the first row for a specific column using the above methods.
You might also be interested in –
- Pandas – Select first n rows of a DataFrame
- Pandas – Read only the first n rows of a CSV file
- Pandas – Drop first n rows of a DataFrame
- Get Row Labels of a Pandas DataFrame
- Pandas Groupby – Count of rows in each group
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