Empty DataFrame doesn't admit its empty

Question

I must not understand something about emptiness when it comes to pandas DataFrames. I have a DF with empty rows but when I isolate one of these rows its not empty.

Here I've made a dataframe:

>>> df = pandas.DataFrame(columns=[1,2,3], data=[[1,2,3],[1,None,3],[None, None, None],[3,2,1],[4,5,6],[None,None,None],[None,None,None]])
>>> df
     1    2    3
0  1.0  2.0  3.0
1  1.0  NaN  3.0
2  NaN  NaN  NaN
3  3.0  2.0  1.0
4  4.0  5.0  6.0
5  NaN  NaN  NaN
6  NaN  NaN  NaN

Then I know row '2' is full of nothing so I check for that...

>>> df[2:3].empty
    False

Odd. So I split it out into its own dataframe:

>>> df1 = df[2:3]
>>> df1
    1   2   3
2 NaN NaN NaN

>>> df1.empty
False

How do I check for emptiness (all the elements in a row being None or NaN?)

http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/version/0.18/generated/pandas.DataFrame.empty.html

Answer 1

You're misunderstanding what empty is for. It's meant to check that the size of a series/dataframe is greater than 0, meaning there are rows. For example,

df.iloc[1:0]

Empty DataFrame
Columns: [1, 2, 3]
Index: []

df.iloc[1:0].empty
True

If you want to check that a row has all NaNs, use isnull + all:

df.isnull().all(1)

0    False
1    False
2     True
3    False
4    False
5     True
6     True
dtype: bool

For your example, this should do:

df[2:3].isnull().all(1).item()
True

Note that you can't use item if your slice is more than one row in size.