Pandas dataframe get first row of each group

Question

I have a pandas DataFrame like following:

df = pd.DataFrame({'id' : [1,1,1,2,2,3,3,3,3,4,4,5,6,6,6,7,7],
                'value'  : ["first","second","second","first",
                            "second","first","third","fourth",
                            "fifth","second","fifth","first",
                            "first","second","third","fourth","fifth"]})

I want to group this by ["id","value"] and get the first row of each group:

        id   value
0        1   first
1        1  second
2        1  second
3        2   first
4        2  second
5        3   first
6        3   third
7        3  fourth
8        3   fifth
9        4  second
10       4   fifth
11       5   first
12       6   first
13       6  second
14       6   third
15       7  fourth
16       7   fifth

Expected outcome:

id   value
 1   first
 2   first
 3   first
 4  second
 5  first
 6  first
 7  fourth

I tried following, which only gives the first row of the DataFrame.

In [25]: for index, row in df.iterrows():
   ....:     df2 = pd.DataFrame(df.groupby(['id','value']).reset_index().ix[0])

Answer 1

Use .first() to get the first (non-null) element.

>>> df.groupby('id').first()
     value
id        
1    first
2    first
3    first
4   second
5    first
6    first
7   fourth

If you need id as column:

>>> df.groupby('id').first().reset_index()
   id   value
0   1   first
1   2   first
2   3   first
3   4  second
4   5   first
5   6   first
6   7  fourth

To get first n records, you can use .head():

>>> df.groupby('id').head(2).reset_index(drop=True)
    id   value
0    1   first
1    1  second
2    2   first
3    2  second
4    3   first
5    3   third
6    4  second
7    4   fifth
8    5   first
9    6   first
10   6  second
11   7  fourth
12   7   fifth