I'm fairly new to Pandas and DataFrames. I have hacked out a solution to my issue, but it is convoluted, so I think I might have done it "wrong".

Let be given a DataFrame with a column that has a unique ID for each row, like so:

df1 = pd.DataFrame(data={'id': ['ID1','ID2','ID3'], 'col': ['a','b','a']}) 

How do I look up the col value of the row with ID1, using the id value, not the index?

I know I can do df1.loc[df1.id == 'ID1'].col.item() to obtain the same as using the index df1.col.iloc[0], but it just seems convoluted.

Is it the right approach or does there exist a simpler / more recommended way of obtaining the same result?

CodePudding user response：

I think your solution is perfectly fine. However, since the id values are unique, you may want to consider making them the index themselves. Then you would have a shorter way to look up the values:

df1.set_index('id', inplace=True)

df1.col['ID1']

'a'