On 09/04/2014 10:23, Alexis Prime wrote:
Hello,

My question is whether I should write a loop or a function to delete rows.

I'm using pandas. But you may be able to help me as my question is about
the reasoning behind programming.

I have a pandas dataframe that looks like this, covering all countries
in the world, for over 200 rows and many columns:

Canada                20
China                  112
Germany             10
Japan                  12
Martinique             140
Mexico                180
Saint Kitts            90
Saint Martins        133
Saint Helena         166
USA                    18

# So I write a list of small countries that I wish to exclude from my
analysis. What I want to do is to delete the rows from my dataframe.

     toexclude = ['Martinique', 'Saint Kitts', 'Saint Martins', 'Saint
Helena']

After this, should I write a loop to loop through the dataframe, find
the countries that I want to delete, and then delete the rows?

Or should I write a function, which deletes those rows, and then returns
me a new and trimmed dataframe?

Thank you for helping me figure this out.

Alexis


If you are going to do this repeatedly you'd be better off writing a function. I don't know enough about pandas to say whether the rows should be deleted within a loop in the function or a new data frame is returned. But before you write any code, have to checked to see if there is a function or method in pandas that does this for you?

--
My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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