You can do this with pandas: import pandas as pd from io import StringIO
io = StringIO('''\ id A B C D E 100 1 0 0 0 0 101 0 1 1 0 0 102 1 0 0 0 0 103 0 0 0 1 1 ''') df = pd.read_csv(io, sep='\s+', index_col='id') val = df.apply(lambda row: ' '.join(df.columns[row==1]), axis=1) Google for "boolean indexing" to see what's going on :) -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list