Renaming columns in Python

In this tutorial we will learn how to rename columns of a dataframe in Python.

Dataset:

In this tutorial we will make use of following CSV file:

Employee_info

.csv

Download CSV • 1KB

Let us read our file using pandas' read_csv function. Do specify the file path where your file is located:

import pandas as pd
mydata = pd.read_csv("C:\\Users\\Employee_info.csv")

Let us create a copy of our dataset as mydata_copy.

mydata_copy= mydata.copy()

Renaming all the columns

We can fetch the column names as follows:

mydata_copy.columns

Output:

Index(['Emp Name', 'Sex', 'Dept', 'Salary', 'Rating'], dtype='object')

To rename all the columns we can assign a list of new column names as follows:

Note: The column names must be in exact order as the previous column names

mydata_copy.columns  = ['Name','Gender','Dept','Salary','Rating']

mydata_copy.head(2)

Renaming only some of the columns

To rename only some of the columns we use rename( ) function. In rename( ) we define columns = {our dictionary of key-values}

Keys are Old column names

Values are New column names

Let us rename columns Name and Gender to Emp Name and Sex respectively.

mydata_copy.rename(columns={"Name" : "Emp Name","Gender" : "Sex"})

By default inplace = False which means the changes won't be made in original dataset. Thus we need to save the new data.

To make changes in original data we set inplace = True.

mydata_copy.rename(columns={"Name" : "Emp Name","Gender" : "Sex"},inplace = True)

mydata_copy.columns

Output

Index(['Emp Name', 'Sex', 'Dept', 'Salary', 'Rating'], dtype='object')