Essential basic functionality

Here we discuss a lot of the essential functionality common to the pandas data structures. Here’s how to create some of the objects used in the examples from the previous section:

In [1]: index = pd.date_range('1/1/2000', periods=8)

In [2]: s = pd.Series(np.random.randn(5), index=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'])

In [3]: df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(8, 3), index=index,
   ...:                   columns=['A', 'B', 'C'])
   ...: 

Head and tail

To view a small sample of a Series or DataFrame object, use the head() and tail() methods. The default number of elements to display is five, but you may pass a custom number.

In [4]: long_series = pd.Series(np.random.randn(1000))

In [5]: long_series.head()
Out[5]: 
0   -1.157892
1   -1.344312
2    0.844885
3    1.075770
4   -0.109050
dtype: float64

In [6]: long_series.tail(3)