Pandas – Remove Spaces From Column Names

In this tutorial, we will look at how to remove spaces from the column names of a pandas dataframe with the help of some examples.

How to remove spaces from pandas column names?

You can apply the string replace() function to remove spaces from column names of a pandas dataframe. The idea is the replace the space character, ' ' with an empty string, ''.

You can use the .str accessor to apply string functions to all the column names in a pandas dataframe. Use the following syntax to remove spaces from column names –

# remove spaces from column names
df.columns = df.columns.str.replace(" ", "")

Here, we are essentially removing the spaces from column names by replacing them with an empty string. You can similarly replace spaces with any other character, for example, an underscore, '_'.

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 = {
    "First Name": ["Jim", "Dwight", "Angela", "Tobi"],
    "Last Name": ["Halpert", "Schrute", "Martin", "Flenderson"],
    "Age": [26, 28, 27, 32]
}

# create pandas dataframe
df = pd.DataFrame(data)

# display the dataframe
df

Output:

Here, we created a dataframe with information about some employees in an office. The dataframe has the columns – “First Name”, “Last Name”, and “Age”. You can see that two of the column names have spaces in them.

Example 1 – Remove spaces from all the column names

Let’s remove the spaces from all the column names by replacing them with an empty string character.

# remove spaces from column names
df.columns = df.columns.str.replace(" ", "")
# display the dataframe
df

Output:

You can see that the column names now do not have any spaces in them.

Example 2 – Replace spaces in column names with underscore

Instead of replacing spaces with an empty string, we can replace them with a specific string, for example, an underscore '_' character.

# reset column names to original names
df.columns = ["First Name", "Last Name", "Age"]
# replace spaces with underscores in column names
df.columns = df.columns.str.replace(" ", "_")
# display the dataframe
df

Output:

The column names now have underscores in place of spaces.

Summary

In this tutorial, we looked at how to remove spaces from the column names of a dataframe. The following are the key takeaways –

• Use the string replace() function (applied using the .str accessor on df.columns) to remove spaces from column names by replacing them with an empty string.
• You can also replace spaces with custom strings, for example, an underscore character, '_' using the replace() function.

You might also be interested in –

• Pandas – Change Column Names to Uppercase
• Pandas – Change Column Names to Lowercase
• Remove Prefix or Suffix from Pandas Column Names
• Get Column Names as List in Pandas DataFrame
• Pandas – Rename Column Names