How to Convert Pandas Column or Row to List

To convert a DataFrame column or row to a list in Pandas, we can use the Series method tolist(). Here's how to do it:

df['A'].tolist()
df.B.tolist()

Image below shows some of the solutions described in this article:

Setup

We will use the following DataFrame to convert rows and columns to list:

```python
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'A': [1, 2, 3], 'B': [4, 5, 6]})

data:

Convert column to list

To convert a column to a list, we can access the column using either

• the bracket notation ([])
• or the dot notation (.)

and then call the tolist() method on the resulting pandas Series object:

df['A'].tolist()
df.B.tolist()

result:

[1, 2, 3]
[4, 5, 6]

Convert row to list

To get a list from a row in a Pandas DataFrame, we can use the iloc indexer to access the row by its index. Then call the tolist() method on the resulting pandas Series object:

row_list = df.iloc[0].tolist()

result:

[1, 4]

Convert column with list values to row

We can convert columns which have list values to rows by using method .explode(). The example below shows how to convert column B which has list values. We will use new DataFrame:

df = pd.DataFrame({'A':['a','b'],
           	'B':[['1', '2'],['3', '4', '5']]})

with data:

To rows by:

df.explode('B')

Column from lists (string) to lists

Finally let's check how to convert column which contains list values stored as strings to list:

import pandas as pd

data_dict = {'one': pd.Series([1, 2, 3], index=['a', 'b', 'c']),
         	'two': pd.Series(['[1, 2]', '[3, 4]', '[5, 6]'], index=['a', 'b', 'c'])}

df = pd.DataFrame(data_dict)

data looks like:

We can extract list values by using list comprehensions:

[x.strip('[]').split(',') for x in df['two']]

which result into new list of lists:

[['1', ' 2'], ['3', ' 4'], ['5', ' 6']]

If we like to keep the list values in the column we can use ast module:

import ast
df.two.apply(ast.literal_eval)

Which we result into:

a	[1, 2]
b	[3, 4]
c	[5, 6]
Name: two, dtype: object