First row not recognized as column headers

Question

I have the following code:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_csv("14_5.csv")

print(df.head())

              Price,Date,Ticker
             104.0,2016-07-01,A
104.87815067615534,2016-07-05,A
104.41190933506331,2016-07-06,A
104.93195657145004,2016-07-07,A
104.42127356374375,2016-07-08,A

When I add:

prices = df.Price

to the code, I get:

AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'Price'

What am I doing wrong? I want to save each column as a variable.

Answer 1

skipinitialspace=True tells pd.read_csv to skip spaces after delimiter. Notice the difference it makes to the column labels:

In [165]: pd.read_csv('14_5.csv').columns.tolist()
Out[165]: ['              Price', 'Date', 'Ticker']

In [167]: pd.read_csv('14_5.csv', skipinitialspace=True).columns.tolist()
Out[167]: ['Price', 'Date', 'Ticker']

The reason why you were getting AttributeError: 'DataFrame' object has no attribute 'Price' is because the column label was being set to ' Price'. So you would have had to access the column with df[' Price'].

If you use

df = pd.read_csv('14_5.csv', skipinitialspace=True)

then you can access the first column with df['Price'].