Pandas - how to sort a DataFrame via custom sorting of a column?

Question

Below is the output for my DataFrame. I would like to sort the DataFrame by the column animals and subsequently by day. How can I sort animals in the following order: dogs, pigs, cats? Thanks.

index     animals     day     number 
0          dogs        1         3
1          cats        2         1
2          dogs        3         4
3          pigs        4         0
4          pigs        5         6
5          cats        6         1

See the docs: pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/… — EdChum
– EdChum, Commented Feb 25, 2015 at 15:42

Shashank Agarwal · Accepted Answer · 2015-02-25 15:39:56Z

3

You can pass the columns to sort by as a list -

In [30]: df.sort(['animals', 'day'])
Out[30]: 
  animals  day  number
1    cats    2       1
5    cats    6       1
0    dogs    1       3
2    dogs    3       4
3    pigs    4       0
4    pigs    5       6

The order of columns determines how the dataframe gets sorted first, and how ties are broken.

answered Feb 25, 2015 at 15:39

Shashank Agarwal

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2 Comments

user3133136 Over a year ago

Thank you. How would it be done if I wanted to order or the animals column to be dogs, pigs, cats?

Shashank Agarwal Over a year ago

@user3133136: dogs-pigs-cats is not a natural ordering, so the sort function won't handle that (unless you map those values to the ordering you desire). You can use the ascending option to change the order - df.sort(['animals', 'day'], ascending=[False, True]), if you want animals to be reverse sorted and day to be incrementally sorted.

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